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Welcome poupeh missaghi and Julia Conrad to Pilsen Community Books for an event in celebration of poupeh's new book "Sound Museum." A combination of fiction and documentation, Sound Museum fearlessly interrogates state-sanctioned violence and the psychology--and banality--of evil.

In Iran, a curator has gathered foreign journalists for a VIP tour of her latest creation. As the guests sit to listen to her initial remarks, she shares the struggles she's faced in bringing together this exhibition--especially the gender inequity she's battled for her entire career.

But the Sound Museum is no ordinary institution. It is a museum of torture, wrought from the audio recordings pulled from interrogation rooms and prison cells. And the curator--her unbroken monologue drifting through fieldwork examples, case studies, archives, philosophy, and dreams--is only too happy to share her part in this globe-spanning industry.

With sensuous and lyrical prose, Sound Museum bears witness while calling into question the act of witnessing, underlining complicities in systems of power and drawing the reader into the uncomfortable position of confronting one woman's psyche: evil, yet completely blind to her own depravity.

poupeh missaghi is a writer, editor, translator (between English and Farsi) and educator. Her books include Sound Museum (2024) and trans(re)lating house one (2020), both with Coffee House Press. Her translations include Boys of Love by Ghazi Rabihavi (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024), In the Streets of Tehran by Nila (Bonnier Books, 2023), and I’ll be Strong for You by Nasim Marashi (Astra House, 2021). She is currently an assistant professor of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver, and a faculty mentor at the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR.

Julia Conrad is a writer and Italian translator based in Chicago. Her work has been published in The Massachusetts Review, The Offing, The Millions, and the anthology Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Books), among others. She is currently working on a hidden history of women in classical music, to be published by Simon & Schuster.