D-CLAIM is a Dallas-based jazz & literature collective founded by poet/bassist J.D. Debris, backing contemporary poets with hypnotic live-band grooves. Sponsored by Project Poëtica at SMU English, D-CLAIM brings together hip-hop tinged jazz with a poetry reading on the third Thursday of every month, highlighting an improvisational confluence of words and music.

Darius Atefat-Peckham is an Iranian American poet and essayist. Atefat-Peckham is the author of Book of Kin, which won the 2023 Autumn House Poetry Prize, and the chapbook How Many Love Poems (Seven Kitchens Press, 2021). He is editor of his mother Susan Atefat-Peckham’s posthumous poetry collection Deep Are These Distances Between Us (CavanKerry Press, 2023). His work has appeared in Poem-a-Day, The Georgia Review, Indiana Review, Shenandoah, The Journal, Rattle, and elsewhere. His work has also been included in the anthologyMy Shadow Is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora (University of Texas Press, 2020).

In 2018, he was selected by the Library of Congress as a National Student Poet.

Atefat-Peckham grew up in Huntington, West Virginia, and attended Interlochen Arts Academy as a creative writing major. He studied English and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard.

Ste’fon Landers (Saxophone), Kazunori Tanaka (Trumpet), Manny Galindo (Piano), Jackie Whitmill Jr. (Drums), J.D. Debris (Bass)

This event is free and open to the public.

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