rumi roaming: contemporary engagements and interventions originates in the desire to bring a decolonial Rumi-ness to our present contexts and communities. Living in pandemic isolation, many of us drew solace from Rumi, the 13th century Sufi poet-sage. While Rumi is a best-selling poet in North America, the boundary-breaking and situated nature of his work is often lost in colonial appropriations and (mis)translations. Rumi roaming juxtaposes new translations of some of Rumi’s ghazals with contemporary creative non-fiction, poetry, scholarly essays, photo essays, and videos that engage with his work through decolonial reflections on language, human connections, place, and spirituality.

Inspired by Rumi’s own early trajectory across Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey and the spiritual urgings of his ghazals, curator and editor Gita Hashemi draws attention to diverse geographies of Rumi’s circulation and brings together contributors from different cultural backgrounds and disciplines to intervene in the processes of cultural and spiritual appropriation and depoliticization of East-to-West translation. Rumi roaming invites us to think about Rumi in small caps and as a dynamic cross-cultural force within contemporary contexts of translingual poetics and translation politics, global displacement and relation to land and water, Indigenous language revitalization and diasporic language reclamation, and interrogations of spirituality, healing, and social justice.