Sasa Aakil at Rofhiwa Book Cafe

Join Rofhiwa Book Café, Duke Performances, The Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture and Duke Islamic Studies Center for a conversation between Sasa Aakil, multimedia artist and poet and Solayman Idris.

Free and open to the public. Masks required.

Sasa Aakil is an 18-year-old multi-media artist, writer, and the 2021 Montgomery County Youth Poet Laureate. She is a co-author of "I Am The Night Sky and Other Reflections by Muslim American Youth" and the artist behind the "A Man Was Lynched Yesterday" Project. Sasa is also a brown belt in Tung Su Do and a frequent maker of mistakes.

Solayman Idris, from Durham, North Carolina, pens for online and academic journals; lecturing in the Middle East, the Caribbean and the United States. Moving past black nationalism to Amer-African Statecraft, the "Times of the Signs" trilogy, applies metaphysical principles, strategic planning & grand design, to African American global futures. Idris' New World Mahdist Literatures politicize weapons of spiritual war; creating the first Amer African intelligentsia; calling for establishment the newest continental African Nation State, "Orun", as reparations for American Descendants of Slaves. A literary Ark of the Covenant with accompanying, pillars of cloud and fire, "The Sunrise in the West", "StarLogic", and "Dusk Orientalis" tell us how we got here, and more importantly, they guide Us to where We're going...

Sasa Aakil is presented as part of Duke Performances' Building Bridges: Muslims in America initiative funded, in part, by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art & the National Endowment for the Arts, & co-sponsored by the Duke Islamic Studies Center. In partnership with the Duke Middle East Studies Center.