The Red Hen Press Poetry Hour, part of the Broad Stage at Home series on Facebook Live, will present “Finding Truths and Creating Art in Exile” on July 16 at 6 p.m.

This poetry hour will feature Iranian award-winning playwrights Sholeh Wolpé and Nassim Soleimanpour, whose most recent play “NASSIM” will be performed in the Broad Stage 2020/21 season in April 2021. Nathalie Handal and Lory Bedikian are two of many more guests who will participate for readings and conversations on bridging the gap between perceptions and reality of cultural norms.

The artists will dig deep into their lives and the lives that people in the West imagine for them.

Wolpé has performed in solo shows as well as collaborated with musicians and artists. She is the recipient of a 2014 PEN Heim, 2013 Midwest Book Award and 2010 Lois Roth Persian Translation prize. She was born in Tehran, Iran and spent most of teen years in Trinidad and the United Kingdom before settling in the United States.

Soleimanpour’s plays have been translated into 20 languages. He is best known for his work “White Rabbit Red Rabbit,” a theatrical experiment.

Bedikian’s “The Book of Lamenting” won the 2010 Philip Levine Prize in poetry. Her poems have been published in the “Connecticut Review,” “Portland Review,” “Poetry International,” “Poet Lore” and “Heliotrope.”

Handal is the editor “The Poetry of Arab Women: A contemporary Anthology,” a winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award, and has been named one of the top 10 Feminist Books by the Guardian.

The show will be available on Facebook at facebook.com/thebroadstage and the Broad’s website at thebradstage.org/athome for on demand viewing.