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AANM presents a live bilingual poetry reading featuring an incredible lineup of poets: Maya Abu-Alhayyat and Zeina Hashem Beck. Join us as the poets read excerpts from their new works, exploring such themes of language and notions of home.

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is the director of the Palestine Writing Workshop, an institution that seeks to encourage reading in Palestinian communities through creative writing projects and storytelling with children and teachers. 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 also an editor of The Book of Ramallah. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of BooksCordite Poetry ReviewThe Guardian, and Literary Hub. Abu Al-Hayyat lives in Jerusalem and works in Ramallah.

Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet and the author of two previous full-length collections of poetry: Louder than Hearts (Bauhan Publishing, 2017) and To Live in Autumn (The Backwaters Press, 2014), as well as two chapbooks: 3arabi Song (Rattle, 2016) and There Was and How Much There Was (smith|doorstop, 2016). Educated in Arabic, English, and French, Zeina has a BA and an MA in English Literature from the American University of Beirut. Her poem “Maqam” won Poetry’s 2017 Frederick Bock Prize, and her work appeared in The New York TimesPloughsharesPoetry, and elsewhere. Zeina is the co-creator and co-host, with poet Farah Chamma, of Maqsouda, a podcast about Arabic poetry produced by Sowt. She recently moved to California with her husband and two daughters.