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World Poetry Books welcomes one of Greece’s most radical poetic voices, Jazra Khaleed to read from and discuss his English-language debut The Light That Burns Us, an unapologetic indictment of the wrongs faced by immigrants, by a rudderless young European generation, by leftist activists in a Greece and a Europe blighted by neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatization. Khaleed will be joined by his translator, Jason Rigas. 

Jazra Khaleed is an Athens-based poet, translator, and filmmaker whose works focus on issues of working-class experiences and cultures, homeland and origin, immigration and war, and are an indictment of racism, social injustice, and classism in contemporary Greece. He has published four collections of poetry and his work is widely translated into European and Asian languages. English translations of his poems have appeared in The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. He is a founding editor of the Athenian poetry magazine Teflon and specializes in translating political and experimental poetry into Greek. His short films have been featured at international film festivals. The Light That Burns Us is the first book of his poetry to appear in English translation.

Khaleed will be joined by Ahmad Almallah, Philadelphia-based Palestinian poet, whose collection Border Wisdom (2023) is a meditation on borders and displacement, and whose latest work Wrong Winds (2025) considers the impossible task of being Palestinian in the world today.