May Ziadeh Salon and Book Pre-Launch

Who was May Ziadeh (1886-1941) & why was she an important part of Arabic letters? An introduction to Ziadeh’s “Musings of a Young Woman.”

Come for the first of our May Ziadeh salons and a book pre-launch celebration of Musings of a Young Woman (forthcoming, ArabLit Books).

Join scholars, translators, editors, & enthusiasts to learn more about May Ziadeh, her writing, and her importance to the early twentieth century literary scene.

Join Dana Al Shahbari, a May Ziadeh scholar who wrote the introduction to the book; the book’s managing editor, Ibtihal Mahmood; one of our translators, the novelist Layla Alammar; and editor Mennan Salih. Emceed by ArabLit’s founding editor M Lynx Qualey.

Dana Al Shahbari is a PhD researcher at the University of Cambridge, specializing in the Arab Renaissance (Nahda), its intellectual history, and Arab women’s writing. Her research focuses on the recovery of May Ziadeh (1886–1941) through scholarship and archival work. She explores how Ziadeh’s writings that span journalistic essays, poetry, literary correspondence, and experimental prose, challenge dominant narratives of Arab modernity and offer new frameworks for understanding women’s intellectual production and rethinking questions of gender and literary authority. Dana holds both her undergraduate and master’s degrees from the American University of Beirut(AUB), where she also minored in Arabic and Near Eastern Languages. Her work has been published in both Arabic and English, including co-authoring 101 Arab Women Writers(Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre,2024) and contributing a chapter to Feminist Readings in Arab Intellectual History. Alongside her academic research, Dana is also interested in translation and public humanities.

Ibtihal Rida Mahmood is a writer, editor, translator, and poet. She is the translator and co-editor of Snow in Amman: An Anthology of Short Stories from Jordan (2015) and the English translator of Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (2017). Her essays, translations, and criticism have appeared in The Markaz Review, New Internationalist, Qantara, The Seattle Globalist, and Women Writers, Women’s Books. Her poetry and literary translations have been featured in international anthologies, including The Art of Being Human (2013), Premio Mondiale di Poesia Nosside (2014), and Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled & Neurodivergent Poets (2025). She is a contributing editor at ArabLit. She also publishes the Substack newsletter Naked Shadows on a Black Wall.

Layla Alammar is an Assistant Professor at the American University of Kuwait. She earned a PhD in Arab women’s literature and literary trauma theory from Lancaster University and an MSc in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh. She is also a novelist and translator. Her debut novel, The Pact We Made (2019), was nominated for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award while Silence is a Sense (2021) was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She has written for The Guardian, LitHub, the Times Literary Supplement, ArabLit Quarterly, The New Arab, GQ Middle East, NewLines Magazine, and The Markaz Review.

Mennan Salih is a translator, language consultant, and editor; she is also the writer of The Arabic Pages. A PhD candidate at the University of Westminster, she researches metaphors in Arabic literature through a psycholinguistic lens. Mennan—who is originally from Cyprus—has a keen interest in both modern and ancient languages, and is currently studying the Old Babylonian variant of Akkadian. She holds a BA (Hons) in Arabic and Linguistics and an MA in Advanced Arabic.

M Lynx Qualey is the founding editor of ArabLit.