Ya Hala Cafe and Retail Space: Arab Heritage Month Event + Activities
2025-04-27 10:00 - 14:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Suzanne Zahr, Art & Architecture, 2441 76th Ave SE, Ste 160, Mercer Island, WA, 98040, United States
Remember, Ya Hala’s café and retail space is open to all on weekends this April, Fridays 5-9p, Saturdays and Sundays 10a-1p.
📣 IMPORTANT: Some events will require registration/RSVP so you can save a spot!
Take a look ahead at the calendar and then keep an eye out for links to sign up for specific events. You won’t want to miss out.
More details about each weekend’s events will drop on the Monday before. 👀

Contemporary Translated Works Book Group: Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, Translated by Barbara Romaine
2025-05-21 11:30 - 13:00 | Virtual
Join the Contemporary Translated Works Book Group – Now Monthly!
Mechanics’ Institute, in partnership with the Center for the Art of Translation and our new presenting partner, Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum, is thrilled to announce the expansion of the Contemporary Translated Works Book Group into a monthly, member-led series! Beginning Spring 2025, we will host lunchtime discussions (12:00–1:00 pm PT) online via Zoom on the third Wednesday of each month, featuring thought-provoking literary selections from around the world.
Four young, Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are tasked, on account of their heritage, with profiling one of the last living witnesses of the Nakba, the violent expulsion of native Palestinians by the nascent state of Israel in 1948. The old man has no desire to be interviewed, no desire for his memories to be preserved, no desire to serve as an inspiration for the youth of tomorrow. As threats from the team’s editor-in-chief put more and more pressure on the journalists, they must decide just how far they’re willing to go to get the old man on the record.
Join us at 11:30 AM for a Q&A with the translator before the discussion at 12:00 PM.
Free to Folio members.
Learn more and get tickets >>
Order Sand-Catcher >>

Elliott Bay Book Group: Afterlife by Abdulrazak Gurmah
2025-07-01 18:30 - 20:30 | Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, 98122, United States
From the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, a sweeping, multi-generational saga of displacement, loss, and love, set against the brutal colonization of east Africa.
“A work of extraordinary power, giving us a colonial world with utmost intimacy, capturing its cruelties and complexities, immersing us in vividly evoked characters, showing us moments of incredible tenderness and beauty, and quietly reordering our sense of history.” —Phil Klay, author of Redeployment

Seattle Latinx Bookclub - My Mother Was A Freedom Fighter
2025-09-27 | TBA
This month we’ll be discussing Aja Monet’s poetry collection, My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter. Powerful, poetic meditations on motherhood, sisterhood, spirituality, solidarity, displacement/gentrification, racism, and sexism. As always, our number one priority is creating comunidad. So please feel free to attend even if you didn’t get a chance to finish the book this month.
Nos vemos pronto!
Where to find the book
You can find a copy of their book on Bookshop.org here
Purchase through Estelita’s Library‘s Bookshop.org storefront, and you’ll support Seattle’s local Black/Brown-owned justice-focused community bookstore & lending library.
You can also find the book at Seattle Public Library in print, ebook, and audiobook formats.
About the Book
The poetry collection, My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter is poet Aja Monet’s ode to mothers, daughters, and sisters–the tiny gods who fight to change the world. Textured with the sights and sounds of growing up in East New York in the nineties, to school on the South Side of Chicago, all the way to the olive groves of Palestine, these stunning poems tackle racism, sexism, genocide, displacement, heartbreak, and grief, but also love, motherhood, spirituality, and Black joy.
About the Author
Of Cuban-Jamaican descent, Aja Monet is an internationally established poet, performer, singer, songwriter, educator, and human rights advocate. Monet is also the youngest person to win the legendary Nuyorican Poet’s Café Grand Slam title.

Book Discussion: Antony Lowenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory
2026-03-11 19:00 - 20:30, 2026-03-18 19:00 - 20:30, 2026-03-25 19:00 - 20:30, 2026-04-01 19:00 - 20:30 | Cherry Street Village, 720 25th Avenue, Seattle, WA, United States
Join us next month at Cherry Street Village for weekly discussions of Antony Lowenstein’s book The Palestine Laboratory, and learn how Isrαel exports the tactics and technology of occupation across the world.
(And check out these infographics from @iceoutoftarrant , @codepinkalert , @so.informed , @letstalkpalestine , @4corners4palestine , and @seizethemeansshirts for connections to more recent events 🧊)
Register at https://falasteenbookclub.com/fbc-registration/

Book Discussion: Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi
2026-05-20 12:00 - 13:00 | Virtual
Contemporary Translated Works
Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi, Translated by Marilyn Booth
May 20 | 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM | Zoom

Winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies follows three sisters in a small Omani village, each navigating love and marriage against the backdrop of a country transforming from a traditional, slave-owning society into its complex modern present. A multigenerational portrait of one family’s losses and loves, it is the first novel translated from Arabic to win the prize.
Free to Folio & NOTIS members.
RSVP to attend >>
Order Celestial Bodies >>
