Rumi On Death
With Haleh Liza Gafori
Whether the 13th century Persian sage and mystic Rumi addresses the death of the physical body or the death of ego, his conceptions are liberating, inviting us to face and befriend two things we tend to dread most.
In this seminar, we’ll read and discuss poems in which he addresses mortality, immortality, and the afterlife as well as poems exploring the Sufi concept of fana. Often defined as ego death, fana is a recurring theme in Rumi’s poetry and a coveted state on the Sufi path as seekers shed and re-shed the defensive armor and fear-soaked narratives of the imperious and stifled aspect of self, sensing instead interconnection and union with Source. Rumi’s leaping images, rhythmic lines, wisdom, sincerity, and humor shine through the selected poems. In addition to reading them in English, we’ll hear excerpts of the original Persian text as well as related passages from Sufi literature to supplement our exploration.
This session will be recorded; the recording will be available to participants until February 7, 2026. Participants will be part of a Zoom Meeting with Haleh Liza Gafori, which means everyone will have the option to turn cameras on (although that is not required to participate). By joining the class, participants consent to being recorded (only if they opt to turn their camera on). As noted above, the recording will be available to class participants only for a limited time; recording will not be shared for any other purpose.
While this class is designed as a participatory workshop, it can be purchased to be viewed asynchronously (not live) for a similar experience.
DETAILS
Rumi On Death
(A Zoom class to attend in person or watch later)
Dates
Sunday, December 7, 2025
Time
1:00-2:30 PM ET
Cost
$90 USD
“There’s a rich fluency here not just in idiom but in gesture, in spirit. It’s uncanny to encounter eight-hundred-year-old verse this urgent. Gafori’s Rumi teaches me how to wander into mystery—’humble as soil’—without galloping toward some hasty and inorganic conclusion. What a gift this is, what gold.”
—
Kaveh Akbar
Haleh Liza Gafori
Haleh Liza Gafori is a translator, performance artist, poet, vocalist, and educator born in NYC of Persian descent. Her acclaimed translations of poems by the 13th century sage Rumi have been published in two volumes Gold (2022) and Water (2025) by New York Review Books/NYRB Classics.
A bicultural woman with ears tuned to the music of contemporary American free verse and to the subtleties of the original Persian text, Gafori aims to transmit the whirling movement and leaping progression of thought and imagery in Rumi’s poems, offering poems that dialogue deeply and tenderly with our times.
Sharing her passion for Rumi’s poetry and the liberating messages that pulse through them, Gafori has lectured and offered workshops across the country and abroad at universities and institutions including Stanford University, Sarah Lawrence College, St Joseph’s University, the Academy of American Poets, Rutgers University, Bard College, Omega Institute, the Women’s Library in Istanbul, and Union Theological Seminary.
As a performance artist, Gafori presents Rumi’s poetry in cross-media events that weave translations, original text, and musical compositions sung in Persian and English, revealing the often unheard and astonishing rhythm and wordplay of Rumi’s original text. She has performed at New York Public Library, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Le Poisson Rouge, the Bradford Literary Fest, Lincoln Center, and elsewhere.
Gafori is a 2024 MacDowell fellow, and the recipient of a 2023 New York State Council on the Arts. Her translations and her original writings have been published by various journals and presses including Harvard Review, Columbia University Press, Paris Review, the Brooklyn Rail, Literary Hub, and others.
Gafori received her BS in Biology from Stanford University and her MFA from CCNY in Poetry where she completed a thesis of original poems as well as translations of the Iranian poet Sohrab Sepehri for which she received an Academy of American Poets Prize.