Words for Palestine

Join our monthly online series “Words for Palestine” which aims to center and highlight Palestinian voices during this devastating time. Featured readers include Abdelrahman ElGendy, Jessica Abughattas and Hind Shoufani. Summer Awad will be moderating this August iteration.

“Words For Palestine” is co-sponsored by Al Nadwa Freethinking Society, Mizna, Palestine Writes and RAWI, and is free with RSVP. We encourage you to make a donation to support the work of Palestine Legal and Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF). Palestine Legal is an organization dedicated to protecting the civil and constitutional rights of people in the U.S. who speak out for Palestinian freedom. PCRF is the primary humanitarian organization in Palestine, providing crucial and life-saving relief and humanitarian aid in Gaza.

Meet the Readers

Abdelrahman ElGendy is an Egyptian writer, translator and activist from Cairo based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A former six-year political prisoner in Egypt, ElGendy writes about counter-narratives, state-manufactured archival silences and abolishing empathy as an extension of colonial violence. His writing appears in the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Guernica, AGNI, Mizna, The Markaz Review, Truthout, Mada Masr and elsewhere. ElGendy is a 2024-25 Steinbeck fellow at San Jose State University, a 2022 Dietrich fellow at the University of Pittsburgh’s Nonfiction Writing MFA, and a Heinz fellow at Pitt’s Global Studies Center. His work has received awards or scholarships from Logan Nonfiction Program, Tin House Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Community of Writers Workshop. He is the winner of the 2024 Courage to Write award by the de Groot Foundation, the 2024 Turow-Kinder Award in Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2021 and 2023 Margolis Award for Social Justice Journalism.

Jessica Abughattas’ debut book Strip won the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize and was published in October 2020. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in POETRY, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.

Hind Shoufani is a multidisciplinary Palestinian filmmaker & writer, who grew up in the Leftist communities in the liberation movement. Hind once lived all across the Arab world and is now exploring Brooklyn, again. Her film work has garnered a BAFTA win and an Oscar nomination for the film The Present and her latest documentary, Heavy Metal, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2023. Her award-winning first feature film Trip Along Exodus has screened in over 30 countries. Hind has published creative essays, prose and poetry in international journals, magazines and anthologies, and has been a director, producer and editor of documentaries for over 25 years, globally. She is currently attempting a Coming-Of-Middle-Age hybrid-genre lust and politics memoir, her second feature film, and some semblance of purpose and meaning in the zeitgeist.

For questions, e-mail Rewa Zeinati at rzeinati@accesscommunity.org