BOOK RELEASE! Said Shaiye for ARE YOU BORG NOW? with Douglas Kearney

BOOK RELEASE! Said Shaiye for ARE YOU BORG NOW? in conversation with Douglas Kearney

Monday, June 30, 2025, 7:00 p.m.
East Side Freedom Library, 1105 Greenbrier Street, Saint Paul, MN 55106

Join us at the East Side Freedom Library for a book release reading and conversation with noted author Said Shaiye and award-winning poet Douglas Kearney.

Are You Borg Now? by Said Shaiye (NOEMI Press) is an Afrofuturist memoir returns in a second edition with a new introduction by Douglas Kearney. Said Shaiye’s cross-genre work blends nonfiction and poetry in an experimental interview the author conducts with his younger self, rejecting the conventions of memoir and what

is expected of who writes them, specifically when that writer is an immigrant. Are You Borg Now? ciphers with trauma through a poetics of refusal via hard and beautiful language. Finding vigor in Islam and mirrors in Star Trek: Voyager, Shaiye shifts achingly between memory and improvisation.