On October 7th, Dr. Choman, Director of CGDS, was a guest of the Save the Children-Iraq organization in Erbil. She read a series of her poems on genocide followed by a lighter poem, “The Seventh Wedding Invitation,” from her collection Considering the Women. Dr. Choman then fielded questions and comments from the audience, and received as a token of thanks a piece of art drawn by a fifteen-year-old Syrian girl.
Photo Description: A woman with shoulder length curly brown hair, wearing a green knee-length dress, a black jacket, a colorful scarf, and black shoes, reads aloud from a book, which she holds in both hands. Her right hand is also holding her glasses. Behind her is the lower right of a large projection screen with the words InFocus and New Way to Collaborate in white. The carpet is beige with a muted orange pattern of lines. To the right of the speaker is a grey chair; to the right of the chair is a small table on which we see hand sanitizer and tissues. A black backpack rests on the floor under the table.
Twenty four people in casual dress are in front of a projection screen. On the projection screen we see the words InFocus, in white, against a blue background, with smaller words beneath. In the back row, from left to right, we see seven men and one woman. Two of the men wear masks. In front of them stands a row of six women and three men, one woman wearing a hijab and one man wearing a mask. The front row consists of seven people half-kneeling, four men and three women. The carpet is beige with a muted orange pattern of lines. In the left range of the picture we see the corner of a light green desk on which there is a water bottle, a marker, and a tissue box.