Poet Hala Alyan, whose Three Rooms Press poetry book, Atrium was awarded the 2013 Arab American Book Award in Poetry, will join Kiese Laymon, Nina McConigley, Shara Lesley and Ryan MacDonald in the Lone Mountain Readings Emerging Writers Festival, March 24-25 at the University of San Francisco. Atrium has received high praise from many notable poets.

“Hala Alyan’s poems go after the sensual, to find the erotics in displacement, in memory, in the new land.” —Ilya Kaminsky
“Don’t miss the dazzling Hala Alyan. Wow. When she says ‘the poetry like a spear,’ she isn’t kidding.” —Naomi Shihab Nye
“Hala Alyan’s poems startle us with their beautiful, enigmatic images and capture us with their passionate engagement with the world. A powerful debut.” —Chitra Divakaruni
“For all the stunning angularity in this vision, we do not doubt that what we are seeing and sensing here is a surprising, sharp-edged sense of the real, of a world that had been there all along, just waiting for this poet and these poems to reveal. Start to finish, these poems convey a singular vision and represent an important new voice in the international poetry arena.” —Fred Marchant

Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Columbia Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is a clinical pyschologist and resides in Manhattan.

For more information about the festival, visit http://www.usfca.edu/artsci/writ/news_events/

For information on where to order a copy of Atrium click here.