ArabishWay

ONLINE ONLY: A Novel Idea Author Laila Lalami
2021-05-02 16:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | WA
Description
A link to the live presentation will be available beginning Sunday, May 2 at 3:30 p.m.
A recording of this presentation will be available beginning May 6.
Laila Lalami, author of The Other Americans discusses her work with local creative Jason Graham.
About the Book: The Other Americans
Late one spring night, Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant in California, is walking across a darkened intersection when he is killed by a speeding car. The repercussions of his death bring together a diverse cast of characters to tell their stories and the invisible connections that tie them togethereven while they remain deeply divided by race, religion or class.
About the Author: Laila Lalami
Laila Lalami was born in Rabat and educated in Morocco, Great Britain and the United States. She is the author of four novels, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Award in Fiction. She has received fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program and the Guggenheim Foundation and is currently a full professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. Her new book, a work of nonfiction called Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in American, was published in September 2020.

P&P Live! Aminatta Forna — The Window Seat - with Rabih Alameddine
2021-05-18 17:00 - 18:00 | WA
Aminatta Forna is one of our most important literary voices. In The Window Seat, an elegantly rendered and wide-ranging collection of new and previously published essays, Forna writes intimately about displacement, trauma and memory, love, and how we coexist and encroach on the non-human world.

Movement is a constant here. In the title piece, “The Window Seat,” she reveals the unexpected enchantments of commercial air travel. In “Obama and the Renaissance Generation,” she documents how, despite the narrative of Obama’s exceptionalism, his father, like her own, was one of a generation of gifted young Africans who came to the United Kingdom and the United States for education and were expected to build their home countries anew after colonialism. In “The Last Vet,” time spent shadowing Dr. Jalloh, the only veterinarian in Sierra Leone, as he works with the street dogs of Freetown, becomes a meditation on what a society’s treatment of animals tells us about its principles. In “Crossroads,” she examines race in America from an African perspective, and in “Power Walking” she describes what it means to walk in the world in a Black woman’s body and in “The Watch” she explores the raptures of sleep and sleeplessness the world over.
Forna will be in conversation with Rabih Alameddine, author of the novels Koolaids, I, the Divine, The Hakawati, An Unnecessary Woman, the story collection, The Perv, and most recently, The Angel of History. He divides his time between San Francisco and Beirut.

Mortada Gzar Discusses "I'm In Seattle, Where Are You?"
2021-06-22 18:00 - 19:00 | WA
Gzar will appear in conversation with the book’s translator, William Hutchins. The conversation will be moderated by Christopher Merrill, Director of University of Iowa’s International Writing Program.
The event is presented in partnership with Seattle City of Literature, Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature, University of Iowa International Writing Program, and Elliott Bay Book Company. This event is supported by The Seattle Public Library Foundation. Thanks to media sponsor The Seattle Times.
Closed captioning will be available at the event. The program will be recorded and posted on SPL’s YouTube after the event.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
As the US occupation of Iraq rages, novelist Mortada Gzar, a student at the University of Baghdad, has a chance encounter with Morise, an African American soldier. It’s love at first sight, a threat to them both, and a moment of self-discovery. Challenged by society’s rejection and Morise’s return to the US, Mortada takes to the page to understand himself.
In his deeply affecting memoir, Mortada interweaves tales of his childhood work as a scrap-metal collector in a war zone and the indignities faced by openly gay artists in Iraq with his impossible love story and journey to the US. Marginalized by his own society, he is surprised to discover the racism he finds in a new one.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Iraqi novelist, filmmaker, journalist, and visual artist Mortada Gzar was born in Kuwait in 1982, grew up in Basra, Iraq, and now lives in Seattle, Washington. He earned a degree in petroleum engineering from the University of Baghdad and was later a member of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Gzar is the author of four novels, a children’s book, and a short-story collection; he has illustrated two books for children. English translations of his work have appeared in Words Without Borders, World Literature Today, and Iraq + 100: The First Anthology of Science Fiction to Have Emerged from Iraq, and his journalism and political cartoons are featured in Arabic newspapers. Gzar’s animated films have been featured in international film festivals, his film Language was awarded a grant by the Doha Film Institute, and he created the Seattle Arab Film Festival hosted by the Northwest Film Forum.

P&P Live! Yasmeen Abutaleb & Damian Paletta — NIGHTMARE SCENARIO - with Ashley Parker
2021-07-01 17:00 - 18:30 | WA
CLICK HERE to register for this virtual event!
Since the day Donald Trump was elected, his critics warned that an unexpected crisis would test the former reality-television host—and they predicted that the president would prove unable to meet the moment. In 2020, that crisis came to pass, with the outcomes more devastating and consequential than anyone dared to imagine. Nightmare Scenario is the complete story of Donald Trump’s handling—and mishandling—of the COVID-19 catastrophe, during the period of January 2020 up to Election Day that year. Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta take us deep inside the White House, from the Situation Room to the Oval Office, to show how the members of the administration launched an all-out war against the health agencies, doctors, and scientific communities, all in their futile attempts to wish away the worst global pandemic in a century.
Yasmeen Abutaleb* covers health policy for the Washington Post. She chronicled the Trump administration’s coronavirus response and White House task force in 2020. She previously reported for Reuters.
Damian Paletta is the economics editor at the Washington Post and previously covered the White House for the Post and the Wall Street Journal.
The authors will be in conversation with Ashley Parker, a Pulitzer Prize winning White House reporter for The Washington Post.
*I couldn’t confirm that she was Arab but I went ahead and added this event to the calendar just in case!

Omar El Akkad in Conversation With Roy Scranton
2021-07-20 17:00 - 18:00 | WA
From Omar El Akkad, the widely acclaimed author of American War, comes What Strange Paradise (Knopf), a beautifully written, unrelentingly dramatic, and profoundly moving new novel that brings the global refugee crisis down to the level of a child’s eyes. More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another overfilled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives in their homelands. And only one has made the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who has the good fortune to fall into the hands not of the officials but of Vänna: a teenage girl, native to the island, who lives inside her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though she and the boy are complete strangers, though they don’t speak a common language, she determines to do whatever it takes to save him. In alternating chapters, we learn the story of the boy’s life and of how he came to be on the boat; and we follow the girl and boy as they make their way toward a vision of safety. But as the novel unfurls we begin to understand that this is not merely the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world, it is the story of our collective moment in this time: of empathy and indifference, of hope and despair — and of the way each of those things can blind us to reality, or guide us to a better one. El Akkad will be joined in conversation by Roy Scranton, author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene and We’re Doomed. Now What?.
Register for the Zoom event / Buy the Book

Virtual Event: Emilly Prado with Ifrah F. Ahmed — Funeral for Flaca: Essays
2021-07-21 19:00 - 20:30 | WA
Third Place Books is thrilled to welcome Emilly Prado for a discussion of her debut essay collection, Funeral for Flaca. She will be joined in conversation by writer, creative director, and cook Ifrah F. Ahmed.
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Ifrah F. Ahmed is a writer, creative director, and cook. She co-founded and edits the pioneering Somali arts and culture publication ARAWEELO. Ifrah is also the founder of Milk & Myrrh, a Somali culinary pop-up experience. She has been featured in the New York Times, Teen Vogue, and NYLON. Her writing and recipes have most recently appeared in the LA Times and Whetstone Magazine. Originally born in the beautiful coastal city of Mogadishu, Somalia she now splits her time between Brooklyn and Seattle.

Mona Hajjar Halaby Book Launch!
2021-07-26 17:00 - 18:30 | WA
Date: Thursday, August 26
Time: 5 – 6:30pm PT/ 8 – 9:30pm ET
Cost: FREE –register now!

Join Middle East Children’s Alliance to celebrate the release of Mona Hajjar Halaby’s new book! Mona is a long-time friend and supporter of MECA.

MONA HAJJAR HALABY is a Palestinian-American educator, writer and social history buff, residing in California, USA. She is the author of In My Mother’s Footsteps: A Palestinian Refugee Returns Home, which interweaves the story of her mother’s life and her own sabbatical year teaching conflict resolution in Ramallah. She has created a Facebook page focused on photographs of Jerusalem during the first half of the twentieth century, entitled “British Mandate Jerusalemites Photo Library,” and has also collaborated on the interactive documentary www.jerusalemwearehere.com

FREE, Register Now! www.mecaforpeace.org/MonaHalaby

Omar El Akkad with Jeff VanderMeer (Virtual)
2021-07-28 18:00 - 19:30 | WA
Novelist Omar El Akkad, now living south of here in Portland, but for many years an award-winning international journalist living and working out of Toronto, blew readers away a few years ago with his eerily prescient first novel, American War. He gave a moving reading from that at Elliott Bay. We anticipate similar engagement for readers attending this – and reading – his haunting, beautifully written new novel, What Strange Paradise (Knopf). There is an overwhelmed boat filled with refugees fleeing homelands such as Syria, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Palestine, a boat which, in time, capsizes. There is a survivor, a young boy, and his attempts to elude would-be captors, aided by a young girl living on the island he has washed ashore upon. These are the bare bones of what Omar El Akkad does with extraordinary skill, empathy, compassion.
“What Strange Paradise is by turns tender and brutal in its truths. It is tremendously written, propulsive as it is expansive as it is granular in its specificities. Omar El Akkad writes with such emotional precision, power, and grace. Here we get the wondrousness of children set in sharp relief against a backdrop of the all too common dehumanization then dismissal of refugees everywhere. The book devastates and uplifts, somehow, and we are not left with hope—that isn’t the point—but asked to witness, to see what is here, with clarity, and with fullness of heart.” —Tommy Orange.
“What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad just resuscitated my heart. This novel—following a boy who survives a refugee passage, and a girl whose homeland feels fractured—dares to unite us on the shore of shared human experience, and redefines hope in the face of despair. I want to read this book every single day. I want to live in a world where the beauty of strangers is a heartsong.” —Lidia Yuknavitch.
With Omar El Akkad in conversation this evening will be the wonderful writer Jeff VanDerMeer, who recently did an evening such as this for Elliott Bay readers with his own newest novel, Hummingbird Salamander. A generous supporter of other writers and many good causes, he and Omar El Akkad have some interesting shared literary ‘history’ of a good sort, which will no doubt come out this evening.

Virtual Book Launch - In My Mother's Footsteps by Mona Hajjar Halaby
2021-08-01 09:00 - 11:00 | WA
All times are based on US EDT – 12 Noon = 7:00 PM in Palestine.

Please click here to register for this event.
“Refugees are like seeds that scatter in the wind, and land in different soils that become their reluctant homes,” my mother once told me. As a small child, I looked up at my mother and clutched her hand. The puffiness of her palm reminded me of a loaf of warm pita bread, and when she laced her fingers into mine like a pretzel, I felt safe. I would have walked with her to the ends of the earth.
When Mona moved from California to Ramallah to teach conflict resolution at the Ramallah Friends School for a year, she kept a journal. Within its pages, she wrote her impressions of her homeland, a place she had only experienced through her mother’s memories.

Leïla Slimani w/ Elliott Bay Book Company
2021-08-13 11:00 - 12:00 | WA
We are thrilled to be partnering with nous amis at Alliance Française de Seattle to virtually present one of the most dynamic writers in the world today, France-based Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani. Author of (these are titles in English) Adèle, The Perfect Nanny, and Sex and Lies, books which have garnered critical acclaim in France and all over the world, she is here with her newest, published in the U.S. as In the Country of Others (Penguin). Originally published as Le Pays de Arbes (Gaillmard), which we should have copies on-hand of, along with the English translation, this book is the first of a projected trilogy, loosely tracing Leïla Slimani’s own family story.
“The world of this novel – Morocco after World War II, leading up to the revolt against French colonialism – is beautifully created. Personal life, social life, everyday life spring vividly from the page, and we feel deeply for the family caught in the middle of the conflict of history. An exceptional, powerful novel from this justly celebrated writer.” – Salman Rushdie.
“Leïla Slimani is a wonderful writer, and this gorgeous novel brings vibrantly to life the vanished world of 1950s Morocco, in a narrative at once richly layered and deceptively simple. I loved it and didn’t want it to end.” -Claire Messud.
“A powerful and compelling family saga—about women and subjugation, otherness and belonging, and the often conflicting loyalty to both family and country—written with a deftness that has come to define Leïla Slimani’s writing. It will no doubt resonate in the reader’s mind long after the final sentence is read.” – Christine Mangan.
Presented by ALLIANCE FRANÇAISE DE SEATTLE and Elliott Bay Book Company.

From Bethlehem to Gaza: Palestinian Culinary Resilience & Liberation!
2021-08-16 15:00 - 17:00 | WA
Join Middle East Children’s Alliance & Just World Educational virtually for a summer meal prepared by Vivien Sansour and Laila El-Haddad, together in Laila’s garden. In this exclusive seasonal cooking demonstration, they will discuss resilience against both the physical and culinary partitions of the occupation – as well as its attempts to destroy diversity of food. In this moment of new imagining for Palestine, how can we create a plate that threads us together?
Sign up for this special webinar by making a donation below! Suggested donation of $10 per person.
Your tax-deductible gift will support MECA’s programs in Gaza.

Yassin Adnan and Alex Elinson with Laila Lalami
2021-08-18 16:00 - 18:00 | WA
Moroccan author Yassin Adnan, translator Alexander Elinson, and longtime Elliott Bay friend and noted, award-winning author Laila Lalami are all set to virtually be on hand for this program centered around the U.S. publication of Yassin Adnan’s spirited novel, Hot Maroc (Syracuse University Press).
“Finally, the vibrant work of Yassin Adnan is available in English. Alexander Elinson’s playful translation of Hot Maroc brings us into the heart of today’s Marrakech, an ancient city weathering the rapid changes brought by modernization, globalization, and, most importantly in this book, the Internet. At once a commemoration of the past and an insightful look at our influence on the present, Hot Maroc expands our ideas of a country that has been woefully underrepresented in English-language literature, while taking us on a wild ride through an anonymous online world that holds the power to reveal our true selves.”—Emma Ramadan.
“A witness to his age like any true writer, Yassin Adnan paints a complex and forceful portrait of a Morocco where so often, reality exceeds fiction. Fluidly and beautifully written, this novel is a superb addition to a youthful new wave of Moroccan creative work.”—Tahar Ben Jelloun.
If we have people properly ‘situated’ for this evening which the zoom era makes possible, author Yassin Adnan will be joining us from Marrakech (where he has long been an esteemed prose writer, poet, and journalist), Alexander Elinson from New York (where he is head of the Arabic program at Hunter College, CUNY, and has written his own books and translated works by Youssef Fadel), and Laila Lalami, serving as interlocutor and guide here, joining us from southern California, teaching there at the University of California, Riverside, and writing several acclaimed novels, with her most recent book being a timely book of essays, Conditional Citizens.
This should be a delight on several counts.

Virtual Book Event - Conversation with Randa Abdel-Fattah about her book "Where the Streets Had a Name"
2021-08-29 09:00 - 10:30 | WA
Please click here to register for this event.

All times are based on US EDT – 12 Noon, 7:00 PM in Palestine.
Join us for a conversation with Palestinian-Egyptian-Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah about her book “Where the Streets Had a Name.” She will also read selected passages from the book.

Virtual Book Launch - "A Taste of Gaza," A Cookbook by Lima Shawa
2021-09-12 09:00 - 10:30 | WA
Please click here to register for this event.
All times are based on US EDT – 12 Noon = 7:00 PM in Palestine.
The book is Available for Pre-Order here from Palestine Museum US Bookshop

Join us for a conversation with Palestinian Gazan author, Lima Shaw, talking about her newly published book. Lima will do a live cooking demonstration of the famous Gaza dish “Fatteh Ghazawyeh فته غزاوية.”
Food and Traditions from Home
Lima Shawa celebrates Gazan traditions and cuisine in her new book – A Taste of Gaza.

“Before starting to write about food and traditions of Gaza, my home, I had a mixture of feelings: happiness, nostalgia, and laughter; yet also deep sadness. As I began, memories flooded back: events, family, neighbors, friends, and the wonderful smell of home.“
The book opens with the celebrations, feasts and different seasons in Gaza. Lima Shawa shares Palestinian traditions and recipes full of fragrance, flavors and richness from her beloved Gaza.
*Shortlisted for the Palestine Book Awards 2021
Lima Shawa was born in Gaza and now lives in Amman. She has three children.

Virtual: Building for Hope with Marwa al-Sabouni
2021-09-25 10:00 - 12:00 | WA
We can’t begin to say how delighted, how grateful, how honored we are to finally be able to present a program with author, thinker, architect, Marwa al-Sabouni. If all goes well (In sh’Allah), she will be joining us at this special hour, virtually and ‘live’ from her home in Homs, Syria to discuss her extraordinary new book, Building for Hope: Towards an Architecture of Belonging (Thames & Hudson). Building for Hope comes five years after Marwa al-Sabouni’s first book, The Battle for Home: The Vision of a Young Architect in Syria, introduced the larger world to a writer uniquely adept at using words to convey ideas from books, book-study, life being fully lived (and wars survived) and from the physical spaces of buildings, streets, land-use patterns that do so much to shape how we live as individuals and as communities and countries.

“Ambitious… Building for Hope is expansive, abstract, and at times extraordinarily idealistic… Al-Sabouni argues that architecture is a necessary agent for any kind of peace, any possibility of belonging in our modern, extremely polarized world… It’s especially enlightening to read about Western cities through the lens of an architect specialized in Islamic traditions… Building for Hope is dense and daring. Readers will finish with a list of people and places to investigate, as well as with a firm belief that a better future lies in valuing community over ostentation, coherence and decency over luxury, truly livable cities over places designed purely for profit.” – World-Architects.com.
“A gifted writer and illustrator, al-Sabouni’s visionary ideas will inspire architects, designers and urban planners across the world.” – Shahina Piyarali , Shelf Awareness.
Yes, the illustrations, that language, too. This is one not to be missed.
Saturday, September 25, 2021 – 10:00am

P&P Live! Rabih Alameddie —The Wrong End of the Telescope - in conversation with Aminatta Forna
2021-09-26 14:00 - 16:00 | WA
Sunday, September 26, 2021 – 5 p.m.

This event will stream online as a part of P&P Live! Series
Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her friend who runs an NGO there. Alienated from her family except for her beloved brother, Mina has avoided being so close to her homeland for decades. But with a week off work and apart from her wife of thirty years, Mina hopes to accomplish something meaningful, among the abundance of Western volunteers who pose for selfies with beached dinghies and the camp’s children. Soon, a boat crosses bringing Sumaiya, a fiercely resolute Syrian matriarch with terminal liver cancer. Determined to protect her children and husband at all costs, Sumaiya refuses to alert her family to her diagnosis. Bonded together by Sumaiya’s secret, a deep connection sparks between the two women, and as Mina prepares a course of treatment with the limited resources on hand, she confronts the circumstances of the migrants’ displacement, as well as her own constraints in helping them.
Not since the inimitable Aaliya of An Unnecessary Woman has Rabih Alameddine conjured such a winsome heroine to lead us to one of the most wrenching conflicts of our time. Cunningly weaving in stories of other refugees into Mina’s singular own,The Wrong End of the Telescope is a bedazzling tapestry of both tragic and amusing portraits of indomitable spirits facing a humanitarian crisis.
Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels The Angel of History; An Unnecessary Woman; The Hakawati; I, the Divine; Koolaids; and the story collection, The Perv. In 2019, he won the Dos Passos Prize.
Alameddine will be in conversation with Aminatta Forna, the author of the novels Ancestor Stones, The Memory of Love, The Hired Man, and Happiness, as well as the essay collection The Window Seat and memoir The Devil That Danced on the Water. Forna’s books have been translated into twenty two languages. Her essays have appeared in Brick, Freeman’s, Granta, The Guardian, Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, The New York Review of Books Daily, The Observer, and Vogue. She is currently Director and Lannan Foundation Chair of Poetics at Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.
Click Here to register for this event.
Sunday, September 26, 2021 – 5 p.m ( I believe this is Eastern Standard Time, please double check when you register)

P&P Live! Elizabeth F. Thompson — How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The Arab Congress of 1920, the Destruction of the Syrian State, and the Rise of Anti-Liberal Islamism
2021-09-27 15:00 - 17:00 | WA
Monday, September 27, 2021 – 6 p.m (I believe this is Eastern Standard Time, please double check when you register for this event!)

CLICK HERE to register for this virtual event!
How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The Arab Congress of 1920, the Destruction of the Syrian State, and the Rise of Anti-Liberal Islamism is the story of a pivotal moment in modern world history, when Arabs established a representative democracy–and how the West crushed it.
Elizabeth F. Thompson is a leading historian of the modern Middle East and Mohamed S. Farsi Chair of Islamic Peace at American University’s School of International Service. She is the author of two previous books, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon, winner of two national book prizes, and Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East.

P&P Live! Washington DC 20008

Ben Hodgson & Laura Moulton in Conversation With Omar El Akkad
2021-10-05 17:00 - 19:00 | WA
Tuesday, October 5 @ 5pm (PT)
In 2011, Laura Moulton founded Street Books, a mobile library serving people living outside in Portland, Oregon. That summer, Ben Hodgson became one of her most dedicated regulars, setting the still-unbroken single season record for borrowing. Then Ben’s routines changed, and he didn’t cross paths again with Laura for almost two years. Loaners: The Making of a Street Library (Perfect Day) is the story they began to tell when they reconnected, offering a street-level perspective of a community whose stories are seldom told, alternating between their two unforgettable points of view in this addictively readable, occasionally sublime memoir. Hodgson and Moulton will be joined in conversation by Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise and American War.
Register for the Zoom event / Buy the Book

Laila Lalami: Kepler's Literary Foundation
2021-10-14 18:00 - 19:00 | WA
THIS IS AN ONLINE EVENT. Please consider joining with a book to support programs like this one.
Pulitzer Prize Finalist Laila Lalami—author of the acclaimed novels The Moor’s Account and The Other Americans—opens up with a deeply personal and powerfully researched book about the experience of “conditional citizens” living in the United States.
What does it mean to be American? In this starkly illuminating and passionate detail, Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S. citizen, using it as a starting point for her exploration of the rights, liberties, and protections that are traditionally associated with American citizenship. Through a tour of history, politics, culture and literature, in a book that Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “a gift to all Americans,” Lalami clarifies a vision of the United States where accidents of birth are codified in a hierarchy that disenfranchises and limits some based on skin color and origin. Conditional citizens, Lalami argues, are all the people whom America embraces with one arm, and pushes away with the other.
Online with Kepler’s on October 14 for the paperback release of Conditional Citizens, one of our most compelling literary voices takes a hard look at a broken social fabric which limits the welcoming promise of our famously multicultural nation. In a period of continued international turmoil around borders, a very real refugee crisis and embattled citizenship, be prepared to join the conversation: don’t miss Laila Lalami.
“Consistently thoughtful and incisive, the book confronts the perils of our modern age with truths to inspire the coalition-building necessary to American cultural and democratic survival. A bracingly provocative collection perfect for our times.”—Kirkus Reviews

Candid Conversations with Susan Abulhawa
2021-10-21 12:00 - 13:30 | WA
Thursday, October 21, 2021
8:00 PM 9:00 PM (BST) – 12:00 PM 1:00PM (PST)
Google Calendar ICS

Nahr has been confined to the Cube: nine square metres of glossy grey cinderblock, devoid of time, its patterns of light and dark nothing to do with day and night. Journalists visit her, but get nowhere; because Nahr is not going to share her story with them. The world outside calls Nahr a terrorist, and a whore; some might call her a revolutionary, or a hero. But the truth is, Nahr has always been many things, and had many names. She was a girl who learned, early and painfully, that when you are a second class citizen love is a kind of desperation; she learned, above all else, to survive.

Virtual Event: Margaret Owen with Hafsah Faizal — Little Thieves
2021-10-21 19:00 - 20:30 | WA
Third Place Books welcomes Margaret Owen, the beloved author of The Merciful Crow and The Faithless Hawk, for the launch of her highly anticipated standalone YA novel: Little Thieves. She will joined in conversation by Hafsah Faizal, the New York Times bestselling author of We Hunt the Flame.

IN MEDIAS RES: A CELEBRATION OF THE ODYSSEY PROJECT'S STUDENT JOURNAL
2021-11-03 17:00 - 18:30 | WA
Join us virtually on Wednesday, November 3, 2021 at 7:00 p.m (Chicago Time). for the launch of the 2021 In Medias Res, a journal of The Odyssey Project
Illinois Humanities is thrilled to celebrate the launch of the latest issue of In Medias Res, a journal of creative written and visual work by Odyssey Project students and alumni.
Contributors will read from their published work alongside celebrated Chicago author, Sahar Mustafah, whose recent novel The Beauty of Your Face (Norton, 2020) was listed as one of the New York Times Most Notable Books of 2020.

University Book Store Presents: Laila Lalami in conversation with Dr. Anu Taranath
2021-11-03 18:00 - 19:00 | WA
Conditional Citizens: On Belonging In America (Pantheon Books)
November 03, 2021, 6:00 PM (Pacific Time) Virtual
Free

University Book Store is proud to present author and Pulitzer Prize-finalist Laila Lalami for a discussion about her new book Conditional Citizens. Laila will be joined in conversation with Dr. Anu Taranath, Teaching Professor in the English and Comparative History of Ideas (CHID) departments at the University of Washington.
This is a free Zoom event but registration, through the link provided, is required to receive a Zoom code to join the Webinar. If you have any questions, please email events@ubookstore.com. See you there!
ABOUT THE BOOK
A New York Times Editors’ Choice • Finalist for the California Book Award • Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction • Best Book of the Year: Time, NPR, Bookpage, Los Angeles Times
In this brilliantly argued and deeply personal work, Pulitzer Prize finalist Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S.citizen, using her own story as a starting point for an exploration of the rights, liberties, and protections that are traditionally associated with American citizenship. Tapping into history, politics, and literature, she elucidates how accidents of birth—such as national origin, race, and gender—that once determined the boundaries of Americanness still cast their shadows today, poignantly illustrating how white supremacy survives through adaptation and legislation. Weaving together her experiences with an examination of the place of nonwhites in the broader American culture, Lalami illuminates how conditional citizens are all those whom America embraces with one arm and pushes away with the other.

Laila Lalami was born in Rabat and educated in Morocco, Great Britain, and the United States. She is the author of four novels, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent work, The Other Americans, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, The Guardian, and The New York Times. Lalami is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles. www.lailalalami.com

Rabih Alameddine with Michael David Lukas and R.O. Kwon
2021-11-08 18:00 - 20:00 | WA
One of our favorite, and one of our most necessary literary writers at work today, Rabih Alameddine, makes this welcome Elliott Bay return in virtual form to read from and discuss his brilliant new novel, The Wrong End of the Telescope (Grove Press). Here the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for An Unnecessary Woman, as well The Hakawati, I, the Divine, and others, again tells the story of a singular woman.

2021 Arab American Book Awards: A Ceremony of Live Readings
2021-11-13 14:00 - 16:00 | WA
Join the 2021 Arab American Book Award winners and honorable mentions, featuring awardees Susan Abulhawa, Sarah M.A. Gualtieri, Helen Zughaib, George Abraham, Noor Naga, Aya Khalil, Anait Semirdzhyan, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Dima Alzayat and Sirène Harb for a celebratory live reading, hosted by artist-in-residence Fargo Tbakhi!

In Conversation: On Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America
2021-11-16 09:00 - 10:00 | WA
Livestreamed

In Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America, Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S. citizen, using it as a starting point for her exploration of American rights, liberties, and the place of nonwhites in the broader American culture. Moderated by author Marie Arana.

If you are interested in this event, please double check time!

Jordan Salama with Michael Shapiro (Virtual)
2021-12-01 18:00 - 20:00 | Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, 98122, United States
A journalist and TV producer who works in both English and Spanish, Jordan Salama’s debut, Every Day the River Changes: Four Weeks Down the Magdalena (Catapult), received such awards as the Ricardo Piglia Award and Stanley J. Stein Prize for Best Senior Thesis at Princeton University (yes, he’s young – this started as a senior thesis) on the way to becoming a book.
“Jordan Salama writes with an attentiveness, and a sense of adventure, that many of us might envy; this engaging, intrepid debut promises many more wonders to come. Already he’s shown himself to be a writer with a rare (and inspiring) commitment to giving us the world.” —Pico Iyer.
“The book is more than a notable achievement in travel literature and more than a clarifying window into a misunderstood culture; it is a book of conscience and open-heartedness . . . It is a privilege to savor, if vicariously, this harvest of a promising writer’s vivid journeys.” —Kirkus Reviews.
“This is a born journalist.”—John McPhee.
Joining Jordan Salama in virtual conversation will be rafting guide, interview journalist (Spark), and author Michael Shapiro. His recent book is The Creative Spark: How Musicians, Writers, Explorers, and Other Artists Found Their Inner Fire and Followed Their Dreams.
Co-presented by ORION & Elliott Bay Book Company.
REGISTRATION/INFORMATION

Syrian/Iraqi

Reading & Conversation hosted by University of Michigan-Dearborn
2021-12-06 16:00 - 17:00 | WA
Join Sahar Mustafah as she reads from and discusses her novel. Register here for this free virtual event.

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Virtual Book Event "The Other End of the Sea" by Alison Glick
2022-01-09 09:00 - 10:30 | WA
Please click here to register for this event.
Click here to order the book from Palestine Museum US Bookshop
Join us for a conversation with author Alison Glick talking about and reading from her newly published book, The Other End of the Sea.

Online Class (series of 3): Literature of Rafik Schami With Heba F. El-Shazli
2022-01-24 10:00 - 12:00 | WA
This is a three series class starting on January 24.
Join me on this tumultuous, passionate, and heart rendering voyage back to Syria for this most interesting Syrian-German author.
Through three novels we will travel to Syria and read about a passionate love story of a Muslim woman and a Christian man and learn about the art of Arabic calligraphy. We will journey to Damascus in 1959 and read about the most famous storyteller and in the final novel to read and discuss in this series of classes, Sophia or the Beginning of All Tales, Schami ventures to the land of his childhood, where he is now unable to safely return.
Three bi-weekly Mondays: January 24, February 7 and 21, from 1 to 3 p.m. EST Online
CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS
