Friday, February 15, 2013
7:30 pm
Memorial Church
Stanford University
Free; no registration is required

Join us for a special evening with poet Coleman Barks and storyteller Martin Shaw to explore the playfulness and intensity of the heart and its many secrets. Focusing particularly on Rumi, whose poetry so powerfully opens the heart, the evening will feature poetry, myth, jokes, and lively conversation about the place where language and feeling combine to make a caravanserai of longing. Two travelers tell of their dreams and invite you to join them. Bring your dancing shoes to hurl at the moon.

Coleman Barks is the author of numerous Rumi translations, including The Essential Rumi, and has been a student of Sufism since 1977. His work with Rumi was the subject of Bill Moyers’s Language of Life series on PBS, and he is a featured poet and translator in Moyers’s poetry special, Fooling with Words.

Dr. Martin Shaw is a mythologist and author of the award winning A Branch From the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace in Wildness. Director of the Westcountry School of Myth in the United Kingdom, he is also visiting lecturer in Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s leadership program at Oxford University.

This program is co-sponsored by The Stanford Storytelling Project and The Stanford Office for Religious Life.