MICHIGAN

Wherever someone gathers their thoughts to write towards the truth, or where someone sits down and opens a book to read, it is there that al-Mutanabbi Street starts.” Beau Beausoleil, Founder, Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Project

On March 6, 2015, an exhibit of broadsides, prints and artist books, all part of the Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Collection will open at the Arab American National Museum. The opening from 5:30-7:30 will feature a reading by poet, Dunya Mikhail, a 2013 recipient of a Kresge Fellowship in the Literary Arts and author of Iraqi Nights, The War Works Hard, and Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea. The project is funded in part by the Knight Foundation and the Kresge Foundation.

Baghdad’s Al Mutanabbi Street is the historic center of the city’s intellectual and literary community, a winding street of coffeehouses and shops where books have been sold for centuries. When a car bomb exploded there in 2007, printers, writers and artists from around the world joined together to commemorate the tragic loss of life and the targeted attack on a street where ideas have always been exchanged. The Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here collection, founded by San Francisco bookseller Beau Beausoleil in the weeks after the bombing, includes broadsides, artist books, prints and an anthology of essays and poetry.