Benefit for the Palestine Writing Workshop with Maya Abu Al-Hayyat

REGISTER NOW, www.mecaforpeace.org/lastleaf  to hear the director of the Palestine Writing Workshop, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat— on Saturday, October 29, 11am PT / 2pm ET — with her new book, “You Can Be the Last Leaf: Selected Poems”. She and Deema K. Shehabi will share poetry and conversation in this virtual event.

Booklist wrote about Maya’s new book, “Al-Hayyat’s latest devastating and courageous collection captures the precarious everyday lives of Palestinians with enormous empathy and glistening clarity.”

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is a Palestinian writer, storyteller, and mother based in occupied East Jerusalem. Each day she passes through Israeli checkpoints, like the infamous Qalandia checkpoint, to direct the Palestine Writing Workshop, one of MECA’s partner organizations. Maya and her team at the Palestine Writing Workshop have published award-winning Arabic children’s books and led hundreds of interactive workshops from Nablus to Silwan to Gaza for children, youth, librarians and parents on reading aloud, creative writing, and storytelling. Her work is grounded in the belief that art and literature can change lives and aims to improve Palestinian children’s literacy and also encourage their imaginations. She is a gifted storyteller who captures the attention of children of all ages (and adults too!).Maya also runs writing courses for former prisoners, helping them transform trauma into art.

She has published four collections of poems, four novels, and numerous children’s stories, including The Blue Pool of Questions. She contributed to and wrote a foreword for A Bird Is Not a Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Poetry, and she is an editor of The Book of Ramallah. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cordite Poetry Review, The Guardian, and Literary Hub.

Please join us to learn more about Maya’s work and life in Palestine!