Nafas Reading Series: sarah sao mai habib and Umniya Najaer, Friday, September 25, 2026, 7pm
As part of Nafas Reading Series, join us on Friday, September 25, at 7 pm, at Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave. in Denver) for a reading and performance by sarah sao mai habib and Umniya Najaer. Free and open to the public.
sarah sao mai habib (any pronoun) is a multidisciplinary artist & cultural worker, and diasporic child of Vietnamese, Kuwaiti, and Iraqi lands based in occupied Tewa lands. habib storytells about intercultural, interfaith and interspecies solidarities. Their work is in remembrance of the ancestors who support our embodiment of defiant expansive kinships and collective liberation. You can experience some of habib’s work at The Arrow journal, Mindfulness Bell magazine, Hyperallergic, The Maintainers blog, and Minnow’s The Dive zine. They are the founder of Home Sovereignty Studio.
Umniya Najaer, Ph.D., is an interdisciplinary poet, essayist and Black Studies scholar of Sudanese origin. She is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies and Black Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Umniya’s writing is invested in activating the human ability to feel what each other feels. Her work is guided by a profound reverence for our planetary home, a duty to protect all lifeforms, and a commitment to oppose all systems of dehumanization, brutality, and deathmaking. Umniya’s recent publications include “For My Sister’s Who Entered the Nile With Open Eyes,” “Disarm Humanity: Meditations from the Third Decade of the Third Millenium,” “Dear Alice: for the Murder of {your} Bastard Child of the Starry-Eyed Tribe Born to Children,” and “Spinning: Zuihitsu Fragment on Ecological and Cosmic Consciousness.” Her poetry chapbook Armeika was published by Akashic Press as part of the First-Generation African Poets series. Her work has received support from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Sacatar Institute, Stanford VPGE’s Diversifying Academia Recruiting Excellence (DARE) Fellowship, the African American History Mellon Dissertation Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Advisory Council Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Susan Ford Dorsey Innovation in Africa Fellowship, among others.
Nafas Reading Series, hosted by Nafas Residency and Counterpath, brings together guests at the residency with local writers and artists for presentations of their work and conversation.
Nafas Residency is a new solitary residency in Denver, CO, offering space to writers, translators, artists, and humanities scholars. Priority is given to marginalized communities and/or projects. The space is donation-based pay-as-you-wish and has a simple application process so that it can stay accessible to a wide range of our community. You can find more info about the residency at: https://nafasresidency.org