Sehba Sarwar, 60, gives words to exile and separations, displacement and family ties. The names of places and people in her poems sing: Kashmir. Punjab. Rajasthan. Karachi. Then, in other odes: Houston. Altadena. Arroyo Seco. The San Gabriels.

Sarwar is a writer, artist and community activist who shares Altadena poet laureate honors with writer Lester Graves Lennon. Both are taking the Eaton Fire and helping their community shape it into art.

“Poetry and art create space for people to gather and process loss and celebrate milestones, and also expand community,” Sarwar said. “Breaking isolation is so urgent at this time when our community is dealing with devastation while struggling with worry and fear about other urgent issues.”

Two months post-fire, Sarwar and Lennon will gather other writers in a fundraiser for the Altadena Library Foundation. “Burning Issues” will feature eight writers speaking on what feels most urgent to them, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, March 15, at the community room of Altadena Main Library, 600 E. Mariposa St., Altadena. Admission is free. Donations are accepted at altadenalibraryfoundation.org.

“Right now, people are searching for community,” Sarwar said. “I hope that attendees will find the experience healing.”

Recovery was among the words savored at a Feb. 25 reading at Octavia’s Bookshelf in Pasadena. “After the Fire: Honoring Histories” included poets responding to the devastation in Altadena, audience members sharing resources and others talking about socio-political changes. Poetry can help people see their fears more clearly and find solace in language, Sarwar said. So many lost so much in the pandemic and then the Eaton Fire.

“After the Eaton fire, we wanted to create space for writers to share about the devastation experienced in the community just two months ago,” Sarwar said. “The reading now is an open space for poets to share what’s urgent for them. When I curate readings, I leave poets to decide the content of the work they read, so I will learn alongside the audience members.”

Sarwar and Lennon will share their perspective at the fundraiser to benefit the Altadena Library Foundation. They said while many of the volunteer board lost their homes and businesses, the Altadena libraries are still standing and will continue to be a centerpiece in the community, so the foundation will work to “serve them and our beloved community.”

Other participating writers include Olga García Echeverría, Lisa Cheby, Anita Rangel, Jamie Asaye FitzGerald, Alicia Vogl Saenz, Adhalia Rivera and Hendrick Knapp. Knapp is a senior at Blair High School and Rivera is a freshman at Pasadena High.

Writing about losing her family home in the fire, Rivera, 14, said she hopes to move people and help them feel supported.

“Writing makes it easier to express myself and the thoughts I have,” she said.

Lisa Cheby’s book “Contact Tracing” is a meditation on the first weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown, finding lessons in that experience and remembering them. Returning to normal doesn’t create space for how the experiences of the lockdown changed people, she said.

“I hope through my poetry and readings like this we can take time to acknowledge the transformations that were thrust upon us, the resilience we may not have known we had, and what got us through,” Cheby said.

Artists use what happens to them, creating and recreating experiences to better understand them.

“If we are not learning and growing from what happens to us, are we living or just getting by?” Cheby asked. “For me, writing helps me to move from just getting by to living and connecting.”

Connections to the country of her birth were easy to hold on to for the Pakistani-born Sarwar, who was 19 when she enrolled at Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts. With her family still in Pakistan, she traveled back often, spending a year in Karachi working as a journalist before attending graduate school at the University of Texas-Austin. She lived in Texas before settling in the San Gabriel Valley,

Working across genres, Sarwar wrote the novel “Black Wings” in 2019, and has written short stories, essays and poems and has created site installations as well. She has won awards from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division and Mid-American Arts Alliance.

“I grew up in a home filled with artists, educators and activists and I’m grateful to have been raised in a culture where the role of artists has been to speak out against injustice,” Sarwar said.

Her family’s experience of displacement and migration loom large in her art.

“My parents were born in Indian before Partition tore the subcontinent apart, and they migrated with my grandparents to Pakistan, where I was born. As a teenager, I marched on Karachi streets for women’s rights and against religious extremism enforced by General Zia, a military dictator who was supported by President Ronald Reagan.”

After the fires, Sarwar wrote an essay published by a South Asian net’s work: “As we gather to deliver mutual aid — after witnessing the grief of those in Altadena and L.A. — we must also demand government structures invest in life-affirming infrastructure in our communities instead of funding violence and furthering climate change.”

Sarwar’s co-poet laureate, Lennon, 77, is editor-in-chief of “Rosebud” magazine and Altadena Poetry Review.

“We are grieving the fires, the homes burned, and memories lost for so many of our fellow poets and artists, students, teachers, and community members,” he wrote online shortly after Jan. 7.

Born and raised in New Rochelle, New York, Lennon wrote his first poem at 7 and said he locked into poetry at the University of Wisconsin, where he met poet and writer Gwendolyn Brooks in 1970.

“She was beyond generous in her compliments of my work, going so far to send some of it to her publisher,” Lennon said. He has since written three books of poetry even as he has worked a second career as an investment banker. It was while he was working in finance that he met and convinced Antonio Villaraigosa, then-mayor of Los Angeles, to appoint the first poet laureate of the city. Lennon also successfully persuaded Gibby Schaaf, then-mayor of Oakland, to establish a poet laureate in that city too.

As Altadena poets laureate, Lennon and Sarwar promote poetry in Altadena through events such as “Burning Issues” and the publication of online Altadena Literary Review and printed Altadena Literary Review Anthology. Submissions related to the Eaton Fire are being accepted at altadenapoetryreview.com.

Lennon, who has lived in Altadena since 1992, will read four poems at Saturday’s event. The first is a haiku he wrote near the beginning of the COVID lockdown about a walk with his wife. The final two, including a closing haiku, is about the fire. The last line of the haiku is “Proud chimneys still stand.”