bes is the nom de guerre of a poetperformer, transdisciplinary researcher, conscientious creator and advocate for civil and human rights. Currently Washington, D.C.based, bes began collaborating with Art Is Dead (A.I.D.), an Istanbul-rooted “art and non-art formation” while living in Turkey in her early-mid twenties. Her poetry attempts to scrape the borderlands of memoir, activism, and antropoesía (Resato 2013), verse with an ethnographic sensibility. Arab American poetry and the Beat movement are important strands of influence in her thematic and stylistic tendencies. Involvements in choral and vocal performance, theatre and competitive creative writing and public speaking from an early age inform her poetic praxis today. Recently, bes has shared her work at open mics hosted by Muslim Writers Collective- D.C. (May 2019), D.C. Guerilla Poets Insurgency (February, March, April, May, June) and Istanbul Spoken Word (October, November 2018) and supplied extended vocal improv in a free jazz/noise quartet at A.I.D. Ankara #3 in October 2018. She is a member of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA-NA) and RAWI, the Radius of Arab American Writers.
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