Book Fair
2025-12-17 10:00 - 15:00, 2025-12-18 10:00 - 15:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Washington Preparatory School, 18323 Bothell Everett Hwy, Suite 220, Bothell, WA, 98012
Albayan Science Academy & Cordoba AcademyIn collaboration with Allamaho Albayan Book StoreWe’re so excited to host a fun and family-friendly Islamic Book Fair that brings everyone together for learning, culture, and lots of smiles! A huge selection of Islamic and Arabic books along with fun educational games and puzzles

Highlights of Saturday the 13th:

Bake Sales & local vendors.
Puppet show & Storytime for children.

Monday 14th – Thursday 18th
10:00 am to 3:00 pm

Scott Kurashige with Karam Dana and Linh Thủy Nguyễn — 'American Peril: The Violent History of Anti-Asian Racism'
2026-05-08 19:00 - 20:30 | Third Place Books – Ravenna, 6504 20th Ave NE, Seattle, WA, 98115, United States
This probing account shines a new light on the problem of anti-Asian violence and inspires us to build lasting solidarity.
Third Place Books welcomes scholar, writer, and community activist Scott Kurashige for a conversation about his new book American Peril: The Violent History of Anti-Asian Racism. Connecting domestic and global events that have been erased from the official record, American Peril exposes the history of anti-Asian violence while also tracing the rise of Asian American community protest and activism. University of Washington professors Karam Dana and Linh Thủy Nguyễn join in conversation.
This event is free and open to the public. For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!

Story-telling in the Arab American Tradition
2026-05-13 17:00 - 19:00 | Pigott Auditorium – Seattle University, 901 12th Ave Sinegal Building, suite 140, Seattle, WA, 98122
Join your colleagues and students from across the university for a celebration of Arab American culture! This special event, in Pigott Auditorium, will feature four presenters and performers. It’s free, open to all, and will feature free food. Please RSVP for planning purposes.
Featuring:
Hebah Fisher | Kerning Cultures
Sabrene Odeh | Baladna PNW
Hanna Eady | Dunya Productions
Giovanna Khoury | SU Student
Food provided by Hamsa Arabic Cafe and Restaurant
Thanks to the College of Arts and Sciences and the Office of Diversity and Inclusion for their support of this event.

May Ziadeh Salon and Book Pre-Launch
2026-05-31 09:00 - 10:30 | Virtual
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.

Hannah Moushabeck presents 'Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine'
2026-06-02 18:00 - 21:00 | Third Place Books – Lake Forest Park, 17171 Bothell Way NE #A101, Lake Forest Park, WA, 98155, United States
A love letter to home, to family, and to persistent hope that transcends borders.
Third Place Books welcomes author Hannah Moushabeck to our Lake Forest Park store for a conversation about her picture book Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine: a moving, beautifully illustrated story of a family keeping their home alive in memory.
This event is free and open to the public. For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!

Honoring Ghassan Kanafani
2026-07-08 | TBD
Join us to honor our martyr Ghassan Kanafani, the writer, artist and revolutionary who is a compass of our struggle. We will be studying his works, creating art and building community together. We look forward to seeing you there.
SAVE THE DATE: Wednesday, July 8th.
LOCATION: TBD. Details to come.
Kanafani Lives! Palestine Lives!

Randa Tawil: 'Race in Transit: Tracing the Politics of Migration from Ottoman Syria through US Empire'
2026-07-22 19:00 - 20:30 | Third Place Books – Ravenna, 6504 20th Ave NE, Seattle, WA, 98115, United States
The hope, struggle, and complexity of life on the move
Third Place Books welcomes University of Washington lecturer Randa Tawil to our Ravenna store for a conversation about her new book, Race in Transit: Tracing the Politics of Migration from Ottoman Syria through US Empire. Making migrants the agents of a world history that has too often relegated them to the sidelines, Race in Transit explores the social construction of race in the early twentieth century and its impacts on Syrian migrants to the United States. Maryam S. Griffin, author of Vehicles of Decolonization: Public Transit in the Palestinian West Bank, joins in conversation.

This event is free and open to the public. For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!
***
Randa Tawil is a Palestinian-Lebanese researcher, writer, and lecturer at University of Washington in the Jackson School of International Studies. She holds a doctorate in American Studies from Yale University, and writes about migration, US empire, and the Middle East. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, Margins, and Open Democracy, as well as scholarly journals.
Maryam S. Griffin is an associate professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at University of Washington, Bothell. Broadly, her work examines people’s ordinary movements, both physical and political, and how they confront state power in quotidian and spectacular ways. She is the author of Vehicles of Decolonization: Public Transit in the Palestinian West Bank, part of the Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality book series with Temple University Press, and the co-editor of We Will Not Be Silenced: The Academic Repression of Israel’s Critics.

A Conversation with Novelist Diana Abu-Jaber
2026-07-26 06:00 - 07:30 | Virtual
We explore the role of literature in navigating identity, memory, and cultural belonging.

Join us for a powerful online conversation with award-winning author Diana Abu-Jaber as we explore the role of literature in navigating identity, memory, and cultural belonging.
Through her acclaimed novels and memoirs, Abu-Jaber has carved a unique space in contemporary literature — weaving themes of heritage, displacement, and storytelling across borders. In this live panel, she will share her insights on writing between cultures, the nuances of Arab-American identity, and the enduring power of narrative to bridge personal and political landscapes.

Author Danny Ramadan: Crooked Teeth
2026-08-17 19:00 - 21:30 | Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, 98122, United States
Danny Ramadan, queer refugees advocate and author of The Foghorn Echoes, The Clothesline Swing, and Salma children’s series, visits for his new memoir, Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir, a singular achievement in which a master storyteller learns that his greatest story is his own.
Registration is not required, but helps us anticipate audience size. If you’d like to RSVP, please do so here!
“Writing this memoir is a betrayal.” So begins this electrifying personal account from Danny Ramadan, a celebrated novelist who has long enjoyed the shield his fiction provides. Now, to tell the story of his life, he must revisit dark corners of his past he’d rather forget and unearth memories of a city he can no longer return to.
Starting with his family’s humble beginnings in Damascus, he takes readers on an epic, border-crossing journey: to the city’s underground network of queer safe homes; to a clandestine party at a secluded villa in Cairo; through Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle East, a reckless hoax that threatens the safety of Syria’s LGBTQ+ community, and a traumatic six-week imprisonment; to beaches and sunsets with friends in Beirut; to an arrival in Vancouver that’s not as smooth as it promised to be; and ultimately to a life of hard-won comfort and love.
What emerges is a powerful refutation of the oversimplified refugee narrative—a book that holds space for joy alongside sorrow, for nuance and complicated ambivalences.
“An engrossing account of one queer man’s journey through a life filled with danger, yes, but also great joy. A beautiful read that adds nuance to the stories of so many refugees.” —Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased
Danny Ramadan is a Syrian-Canadian author and LGBTQ+ refugees advocate. He is the author of The Foghorn Echoes, The Clothesline Swing, and the award-winning Salma children’s series. His work has won the Lambda Literary Award, the Publishing Triangle Award, the Independent Publisher Book Award, and was longlisted for Canada Reads. His books are translated into multiple languages and celebrated worldwide. Since arriving in Canada, he has raised over $300,000 to support queer and trans refugees. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.
