Lena Khalaf Tuffaha with Claudia Castro Luna and Rachel Edelman at Elliott Bay Book Company

Poet and friend of the store Lena Khalaf Tuffaha returns for the launch of her latest collection, Kaan and Her Sisters. Fellow poets Claudia Castro Luna and Rachel Edelman will join her for the reading.

Kaan and Her Sisters illuminates the work of grief and survival, the sordid legacies of official historical record and the liberatory practice of intimate narration. Tuffaha writes in the liminal space between languages, personifying Arabic verbs who guide the reader through a “history hurtling into the future.” Kaan and Her Sisters centers character of the Arabic teacher, Miss Sahar, whose progressive displacements from Palestine and across Arab cities unfold in epistles, refashioned songs, and glimpses into the interiors of her lost home. In these disclosures, a study of time and a record of resistance to erasure emerges, and at its heart, the women who keep intergenerational memory. “Our mothers miraculous, persevering./No maps are new to the ancestors.”

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is the author of Water & Salt, winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award. She is the translator and curator of the Poems from Palestine series at the Baffler magazine. She is the winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry, for her book Something About Living (U of Akron Press, 2024). Her second book of poems, Kaan & Her Sisters is available now from Trio House Press.

Claudia Castro Luna has been an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate fellow, the Washington State Poet Laureate, and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet. She is the author of Cipota Under the Moon; One River, A Thousand Voices; the Pushcart nominated Killing Marías, shortlisted for the Washington State 2018 Book Award in poetry; and the chapbook This City. Her most recent nonfiction can be found in the anthology There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis. Born in El Salvador, she came to the United States in 1981. Living in English and Spanish, Claudia writes and teaches in Seattle on unceded Duwamish lands where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.

Rachel Edelman is a Jewish poet raised in Memphis, TN whose writing explores the creative work of diasporic living. Her poems have appeared in Narrative, The Seventh Wave, West Branch, and many other journals, and she has received material support from the Academy of American Poets, the University of Washington, Mineral School, Crosstown Arts, and Tin House. She teaches Language Arts in the Seattle Public Schools, where embodiment and care root her personal, poetic, and pedagogical practice. Her debut book, Dear Memphis, will be published by River River Books in January 2024.