Sharifa A Tartoussi

Fearless Voices Slam Poet

Sharifa A Tartoussi is a dental student, poet and performer. Equal parts worrier, warrior and all round human, when she is not squinting at teeth or hitting the books, she writes and sometimes, she works up the courage to perform. 

She is involved in several creative projects, most notably becoming half the founding party of GriffinSpeak; a poetry and spoken word gig that runs quarterly and aims to create space for voices from marginalised groups around Melbourne. 

Her style has been described as teetering on the boundary between the fire that warms and the fire that burns with a unique mix of traditional storytelling, millennial boundary pushing and raw emotion with influences from both eastern and western art and literature owing to her traditional Arab upbringing in a western climate. 

Her work focuses mainly on ideas of race identity, feminism in the arts and what it means to be a young Middle Eastern Muslim woman living in a world that is constantly debating her right to exist. 

She has performed in a variety of spaces ranging from traditional stages to the backs of café’s and dimly lit parking lots with her first slam win in November of 2016. 

She has a soft spot for traditional middle-eastern poets that have not yet been propelled into the realms of mainstream appropriation, baby goats, dishes that contain coconut milk, outrageously large glasses and anything that reminds her of pre-war home.

Liberty Victoria presents Fearless Voices at The Thornbury Theatre 2 pm on Sunday 1 October.

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