Join us to celebrate Kiran Bhat and his new poetry collection Speaking in Tongues: Poems in Spanish, Chinese, and Turkish. Kiran will be conversation with Anjali Enjeti, Georgia author of The Parted Earth. This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. The event is happening after normal library hours, so please enter through the lower level, rear doors (off of the bottom floor of the parking deck), directly next to the auditorium. There free parking behind the library, but if it's full, you can find other parking throughout Decatur here.

About the Book

Speaking in Tongues is an attempt to unify three disparate poetry suites, written originally in Spanish, Mandarin, and Turkish, and then self-translated into English. The Spanish language poems — Autobiografia — rewrites twenty years of the poet’s life into fragments on race, queerness, identity, and growing up between cultures. The Mandarin poems — 客然脑说 — fuses the Confucian dialectic structure with Bhakti, as the poet responds to the existential questions posed to him. The Turkish language suite — Seyahatname — appropriates Evliya Çelebi's infamous travelogue into a reimagination of the national narratives of the eighteen countries the poet considers home.

Praise for Speaking in Tongues

Already polylingual, Kiran Bhat made a choice to write in the language that was unfamiliar to him precisely in order to better experience the unknown or the strange in the lyric and in life. These poems sparkle with their efforts and their efforts are never in vain. — Kazim Ali

A deeply fascinating text brimming with playfulness and passion. Good literature is an act of self-excavation and self-invention. Kiran Bhat achieves this again and again in this gorgeous book. — Diriye Osman

Breaking the language barrier across a triptych of rhapsodic sequences, bridging lyrical confession to koan-esque self-questioning and the personification of whole nations, these poems are by turns restless, vulnerable, erotic and declamatory; full of hard-won insights into evolving selfhood. — Cyril Wong

About the Author

Kiran Bhat is an Indian-American author, traveller, and polyglot. He is known as the author of we of the forsaken world..., but has published books in five different languages, and has had his writing published in journals, such as The Caravan, The Bengaluru Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, The Brooklyn Rail, 3:AM Magazine, SOFTBLOW, and many other places. He currently lives in Mumbai, where he is attempting to translate contemporary Mayan writings into English and Kannada. Speaking in Tongues is a compilation of his foreign language poetry published by Red River, and he also is working on a web serialization novel called Girar (www.girar.world), which aspires to capture the flow and feelings of daily life across 365 different places on our planet by reimagining a mother and father archetype into a new cultural context and nationality in each installation, and sends its stories to subscribers via email. He is currently the co-chair of the Environmental Sustainability Subcommittee of the Global Indian Council.

About the Moderator

Anjali Enjeti is a former attorney, organizer, and journalist based near Atlanta. She is the author of Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change, and The Parted Earth. Her other writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Harper’s Bazaar, Oxford American, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing in the MFA programs at Antioch University in Los Angeles and Reinhardt University in Waleska, Georgia. Anjali is the recipient of the 2022 Georgia Author of the Year Award for First Novel, a gold medal for Best Regional Nonfiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and is a finalist for the 2023 Townsend Prize for Fiction. She has also received awards from the South Asian Journalists Association and the American Society of Journalists and Authors, multiple Pushcart Prize nominations, two notable mentions in The Best American Essays series, and residencies and fellowships from Sundress Academy of the Arts, the Hambidge Center, and Wildacres. A former board member of the National Book Critics Circle, she was named to Good Morning America’s 2021 Asian American and Pacific Islander Inspiration List and has appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition, Peacock’s Zerlina, Amerie’s Book Club, and In the Thick podcast. Since 2017, Anjali has been working to get out the vote in Georgia’s Asian American and Pacific Islander community. In 2019, she co-founded the Georgia chapter of They See Blue, an organization for South Asian Democrats. In the fall of 2020, she was a member of Georgia’s AAPI Leadership Council for the Biden Harris campaign.