“No shoes, no music, just prayer.” This is how Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, the Ethiopian nun, composer and pianist, described the decade she spent in Gishen Debre Kerbe, a hilltop monastery she entered at the age of 19. Educated at a classical conservatoire in Cairo, she returned to the piano after leaving the convent, composing devotional music deeply influenced by Ethiopian folk songs, ragtime, classical European music, gospel and the choral traditions of her country’s Orthodox Tewahedo Church. In 1984 she fled her home in Addis Ababa, relocating to Debre Genet monastery in the heart of West Jerusalem, where she lived in seclusion, until her death in 2023 at the age of 99. Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru has dedicated her entire life to music as her own intimate language and form of prayer. In honor of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, the Nigerian poet and essayist Logan February and the Tamil-German novelist and theologian Senthuran Varatharajah will read their own original poetry, as well as poetry of other writers, accompanied by Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru’s sacred music, played by the pianist Dongkyu Leo Kim.