International Writers Series: Dabin Jeong and Safa Khatib in Conversation
The International Writers Series presents a poetry reading by two PhD students in the International Writers Series celebrating their recent publications. Safa Khatib will read from her book A Dress of Locusts (Bloomsbury 2025) while Dabin Jeong will read from their chapbook Swallow (Small Harbor Publishing, 2025). They will be accompanied by Varun Chandrasekhar, PhD candidate in Music Theory, on guitar. The performance will be followed by a conversation on poetry, power, translation, and music.
Free and open to all, registration is requested.
Dabin Jeong (they/them) is a poet and literary translator from Seoul, South Korea. They are the author of the chapbook Swallow (Small Harbor Publishing, 2025). Their works appeared or are forthcoming in A Public Space, The Journal, Pinch, Diode Poetry Journal, Quarterly West, Modern Poetry in Translation, and the Southern Review. They are a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis.
Safa Khatib is the author of the poetry collection A Dress of Locusts (Bloomsbury 2025) and editor of Lunette Press. Her current projects include a translation of El Extremado Amor, by Venezuelan poet and critic Esdras Parra, a performance in a staged reading of the play Helene’s Dreams, by Amira Khelfallah, and a series of poems in response to Suleiman Al-Bustani’s 1904 translation of the Iliad into Arabic. She presented a performance work titled “Etudes” in collaboration with poet, printmaker, and photographer Jules Sprake at the 2025 European Poetry Festival. Her recent essay “Letter to Esdras Parra,” appears in the Autumn 2025 issue of The Poetry Review. She is a PhD candidate in the International Writers Track in the department of Comparative Literature and Thought.
Varun Chandrasekhar is a PhD candidate in Music Theory in the Department of Music. His work investigates questions about freedom in jazz through the lens of Sartrean existentialism. Varun has had articles published in the journals Jazz and Culture, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Musicology Now, and reviews published in The Journal for the Society of American Music, The Journal of Jazz Studies, and The Journal of Musicological Research. Varun has presented his research at a litany of national and international conferences, including all three major music conferences (AMS, SMT, SEM), Cultural Studies Conferences, Jazz Studies Conferences, and Popular Music Studies Conferences. Varun’s research has been supported by WashU’s Center for the Humanities Graduate Student Fellowship and WashU’s American Cultural Studies Department’s Lynne Cooper Harvey Fellow. He is also an affiliate of WashU’s Center for the Study of Race, Equity, and Ethnicity. In the Spring of 2026, Varun will host “A Conference…But It’s Midwestern Emo,” the first conference dedicated to the study of emo music.
Leviathan Books will have copies of both books for sale. Due to supply issues from the UK, they ask that attendees order Khatib’s book ahead of time if they’d like a copy at the event.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature.