ArabishWay

Jamal Gabobe presents 'The Path of Difference' at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park
2022-09-19 19:00 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Third Place Books – Lake Forest Park, 17171 Bothell Way NE #A101, Lake Forest Park, WA, 98155, United States
Third Place Books welcomes local poet Jamal Gabobe to our Lake Forest Park store! Gabobe will be discussing his third collection of poetry The Path of Difference. This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required in advance.
Copies of The Path of Difference will be available for purchase at the store. 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!

Benefit for the Palestine Writing Workshop with Maya Abu Al-Hayyat
2022-10-29 11:00 - 12:30 | Virtual
REGISTER NOW, www.mecaforpeace.org/lastleaf to hear the director of the Palestine Writing Workshop, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat— on Saturday, October 29, 11am PT / 2pm ET — with her new book, “You Can Be the Last Leaf: Selected Poems”. She and Deema K. Shehabi will share poetry and conversation in this virtual event.
Booklist wrote about Maya’s new book, “Al-Hayyat’s latest devastating and courageous collection captures the precarious everyday lives of Palestinians with enormous empathy and glistening clarity.”

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is a Palestinian writer, storyteller, and mother based in occupied East Jerusalem. Each day she passes through Israeli checkpoints, like the infamous Qalandia checkpoint, to direct the Palestine Writing Workshop, one of MECA’s partner organizations. Maya and her team at the Palestine Writing Workshop have published award-winning Arabic children’s books and led hundreds of interactive workshops from Nablus to Silwan to Gaza for children, youth, librarians and parents on reading aloud, creative writing, and storytelling. Her work is grounded in the belief that art and literature can change lives and aims to improve Palestinian children’s literacy and also encourage their imaginations. She is a gifted storyteller who captures the attention of children of all ages (and adults too!).Maya also runs writing courses for former prisoners, helping them transform trauma into art.
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 an editor of The Book of Ramallah. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cordite Poetry Review, The Guardian, and Literary Hub.

Please join us to learn more about Maya’s work and life in Palestine!

Online Ticket—Poetry Reading—Out of the Ordinary Conference
2022-12-04 22:00 - 23:00 | Virtual
This public poetry reading forms part of the programme of Out of the Ordinary: On Poetry and the World, a three day conference on poetry’s relationship to the extraordinary. This carbon-neutral event will be held at the University of Canberra over December 5th, 6th and 7th 2022. For all further info: https://www.ucpoetry2022.info/
READERS:, Paul Collis, Olena Kalytiak Davis and Omar Sakr
Omar Sakr is a poet and writer born in Western Sydney to Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants. He is the author of These Wild Houses (Cordite Books, 2017), and The Lost Arabs (University of Queensland Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. He is the first Arab-Australian Muslim to win this prestigious award. The Lost Arabs was also shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, the John Bray Poetry Award, the NSW Premier’s Multicultural Literary Award, and the Colin Roderick Award; it has been released in the US and worldwide through Andrews McMeel Universal. In 2019, Omar was the recipient of the Edward Stanley Award for Poetry, and in 2020, the Woollahra Digital Literary Award for Poetry. His poems have been published in English, Arabic, and Spanish. Omar’s debut novel, Son of Sin (Affirm Press), was published in 2022.
http://omarsakr.com/

Growth: Open Mic w/ Hana Saad
2023-02-24 16:00 - 17:30
7 p.m. ET Friday, Feb. 24, 2023
Growth: Open Mic w/ Hana Saad
In-person at AANM
Free with RSVP | Register for Livestream
Please note: To share work at the Open Mic, you must attend in person. An online livestream is available for non-local residents to tune in as part of the audience only.

Join us for an Open Mic Night, hosted by AANM artist-in-residence Hana Saad! We are creating a space for writers and musicians to continue sharing their work. We invite you to reflect on the theme of Growth – both literally and figuratively. Prepare a three-minute story about your favorite plant, the ways the world has changed you, or a lamentation for the earth. Hana Saad will also share the poetry she’s created while in residency, about the flowers of the Beqaa Valley.

Black SWANA Lit: Mizna Reading + DJ – An AWP Offsite Event [In-Person Only]
2023-03-09 19:30 - 21:30 | Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave, 2, Seattle, WA, 98122, United States
Northwest Film Forum and Mizna present an AWP offsite reading to mark the release of Mizna’s Black Takeover Issue, guest-edited by acclaimed poet Safia Elhillo. This collection of Black writing from the SWANA region and diaspora is a first-of-its-kind, and we’re celebrating its launch with a killer line-up of writers including Safia Elhillo and a DJ set by fab creative Ladin Awad.
This program is supported by National Endowment for the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, and Minnesota Center for Humanities.

AWP Offsite: Glossing the Margins—A Bi-lingual Arabic-English Poetry Reading
2023-03-10 19:00 - 20:00 | Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, 98122, United States
AWP Offsite: Glossing the Margins—A Bi-lingual Arabic-English Poetry Reading
Friday Mar 10 2023 7:00pm – 8:00pm
Join us for an evening of poetry in which the borders between languages fall away and only poetry remains. Featuring poets Deema Shehabi, Fady Joudah, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Lubna Safi, and Zeina Hashem Beck.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is the author of Water & Salt, winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award. She is the translator and curator of the Poems from Palestine series at the Baffler magazine. She is the winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry, for her book Something About Living (U of Akron Press, 2024). Her second book of poems, Kaan & Her Sisters is forthcoming from Trio House Press in July, 2023.
Fady Joudah has published five collections of poems: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu; a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and, most recently, Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received the Arab American Book Award, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is an Editor-at-Large for Milkweed Editions. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.
Deema K. Shehabi is the author of Thirteen Departures From the Moon and co-editor with Beau Beausoleil of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, for which she received the Northern California Book Award’s NCBR Recognition Award. She is also co-author of Diaspo/Renga with Marilyn Hacker and the winner of the Nazim Hikmet poetry competition in 2018.
Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet and the author of, most recently, O, named a Best Book of the Year by Literary Hub and The New York Public Library. She’s the co-creator and co-host of Maqsouda, a podcast about Arabic poetry produced by Sowt.
Lubna Safi is a poet, writer, and graduate student residing in California. Her poems and essays have been published in Guernica, The Journal, MIZNA, and elsewhere. Her first poetry collection, Your Blue and the Quiet Lament won the Walt McDonald First Book Prize in Poetry and is published by Texas Tech University Press

AWP Seattle Offsite Reading
2023-03-10 19:00 - 20:30 | Cherry Street Coffee House (Pioneer Square), 700 1st Avenue, Seattle, WA, 98104, United States
Join us at AWP Seattle for an offsite reading at Cherry Street Coffee House (700 1st Avenue location) on Friday, March 10, at 7 PM, featuring poets Gabrielle Bates, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Patrycja Humienik, Jason Koo, Eugenia Leigh, José Olivarez, imogen xtian smith and Dujie Tahat! Free and open to the public. Doors will open for the event at 6:30 PM and readings will begin at 7. Book signing to follow.

Between Spaces – An AWP Off Site Reading
2023-03-10 19:00 - 22:00 | Common AREA Maintenance, 2125 2nd Ave, Seattle, WA, 98121, United States
University of Washington Bothell MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics, Kelsey Street Press, Essay Press and Bellingham Review host a hybridisciplinary phonetic transference (an awp offsite reading) featuring Ally Ang, Kiran Bath, Steven Dunn, Valerie Hsiung, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Dennis James Sweeney, Andrea Abi-Karam and Keith S. Wilson.

Hassaniya Arabic Poetry by Saharawi poet Zaim Allal
2023-03-20 11:30 - 13:00 | Virtual
Part of the Late Winter Poetry Translation Workshops 2023 collection
Translating the work of Zaim Allal, a famous Saharawi poet who is living in a refugee camp in Algeria with Hamza Lakhal.

Poet Charif Shanahan with Luther Hughes and Jane Wong
2023-03-21 19:00 - 20:00 | Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, 98122, United States
Chicago poet Charif Shanahan visits Seattle on the occasion of his second published collection of poetry Trace Evidence. Two acclaimed local poets who have both read their poetry on Elliott Bay’s stage, Jane Wong and Luther Hughes, will join in the celebratory night of poetry.

Poetry Workshop on Arabic Poetry Forms
2023-04-11 17:30 - 19:00 | Virtual
Workshop Description
Depending how you say it, “ghazal” is either a gazelle or a type of poem. So if you really wanted to, you could write en-DEERing poetry with us! In honor of April’s commemoration as National Poetry Month and Arab American Heritage Month, this BrainTrust explores some traditional and contemporary forms and styles found in MENA and Arab American poetry.
Instructed by Nadia Alamah

Book Launch: Mona Kareem's 'I Will Not Fold These Maps'
2023-05-14 10:00 - 11:00 | Virtual
Join us for the launch of Mona Kareem’s poetry collection *I WILL NOT FOLD THESE MAPS*, with Mona Kareem, translator Sara Elkamel, editor Nashwa Nasreldin, and hosted by ArabLit’s M. Lynx Qualey. Co-organized by the Poetry Translation Centre and ArabLit, this will be an hour of brilliant poetry & vibrant discussion.

For more about the collection, and to pre-order, visit the Poetry Translation Centre website:
https://www.poetrytranslation.org/shop/i-will-not-fold-these-maps
And, for those attending the event, there is a special 10% discount through this link.
Mona Kareem is the author of three poetry collections. Her poetry has been translated into nine languages, and appeared (in English) in: POETRY, Poetry Northwest, Michigan Quarterly, Poetry London, Modern Poetry in Translation, among others. She is a recipient of a 2021 literary grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Kareem holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and works as an assistant professor of Middle East Studies at Washington University St. Louis. Her translations include Ashraf Fayadh’s Instructions Within (nominated for a BTBA award), Ra’ad Abdulqadir’s Except for this Unseen Thread, and Octavia Butler’s Kindred.
Sara Elkamel is a poet, journalist and translator based in Cairo. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University, and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Elkamel’s poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, The Yale Review, and Gulf Coast, among others, and in the anthologies Best New Poets ‘20 & ‘22 and Best of the Net ‘20. She was named the winner of Redivider’s 2021 Blurred Genre Contest and the Tinderbox’s 2022 Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize. Elkamel’s debut chapbook “Field of No Justice” was published by the African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books in 2021.
Nashwa Nasreldin is a writer, editor, and a translator of Arabic literature. She is the translator of the collaborative novel, Shatila Stories, from Peirene Press, and Talib al-Rifae’s novel Shadow of the Sun, which is forthcoming from Banipal Books. She is a contributing editor of ArabLit.org and ArabLit Quarterly, and holds an MFA in Poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Kahlil Gibran ~ In Search of a Prophet
2023-05-17 18:30 - 19:30 | Virtual
This event commemorates the 100th Anniversary of the publication of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.
Join Paul-Gordon Chandler in conversation with Q&A about his new book, In Search of a Prophet: A Spiritual Journey with Kahlil Gibran, exploring the all-embracing spirituality of Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese born Arab-American poet-artist, mystic and best-selling author of The Prophet.
In Search of a Prophet is a fascinating journey through the spiritual life of Kahlil Gibran. Paul-Gordon Chandler explores this beloved writer and artist, a mystic who sought to build bridges and tear down walls.
In Search of a Prophet is not a traditional biography, but a compelling spiritual journey through Gibran’s writings, art, and the places he lived. From his birthplace village high in the snowy mountains of Lebanon, Chandler leads us through his emigration to Boston, art training in Paris, career in New York, and to the far reaching places of influence his writings and art have traveled, from Cairo to Mexico City.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha with Claudia Castro Luna and Rachel Edelman at Elliott Bay Book Company
2023-09-12 19:00 - 20:30 | Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, 98122, United States
Poet and friend of the store Lena Khalaf Tuffaha returns for the launch of her latest collection, Kaan and Her Sisters. Fellow poets Claudia Castro Luna and Rachel Edelman will join her for the reading.
Kaan and Her Sisters illuminates the work of grief and survival, the sordid legacies of official historical record and the liberatory practice of intimate narration. Tuffaha writes in the liminal space between languages, personifying Arabic verbs who guide the reader through a “history hurtling into the future.” Kaan and Her Sisters centers character of the Arabic teacher, Miss Sahar, whose progressive displacements from Palestine and across Arab cities unfold in epistles, refashioned songs, and glimpses into the interiors of her lost home. In these disclosures, a study of time and a record of resistance to erasure emerges, and at its heart, the women who keep intergenerational memory. “Our mothers miraculous, persevering./No maps are new to the ancestors.”
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is the author of Water & Salt, winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award. She is the translator and curator of the Poems from Palestine series at the Baffler magazine. She is the winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry, for her book Something About Living (U of Akron Press, 2024). Her second book of poems, Kaan & Her Sisters is available now from Trio House Press.
Claudia Castro Luna has been an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate fellow, the Washington State Poet Laureate, and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet. She is the author of Cipota Under the Moon; One River, A Thousand Voices; the Pushcart nominated Killing Marías, shortlisted for the Washington State 2018 Book Award in poetry; and the chapbook This City. Her most recent nonfiction can be found in the anthology There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis. Born in El Salvador, she came to the United States in 1981. Living in English and Spanish, Claudia writes and teaches in Seattle on unceded Duwamish lands where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.
Rachel Edelman is a Jewish poet raised in Memphis, TN whose writing explores the creative work of diasporic living. Her poems have appeared in Narrative, The Seventh Wave, West Branch, and many other journals, and she has received material support from the Academy of American Poets, the University of Washington, Mineral School, Crosstown Arts, and Tin House. She teaches Language Arts in the Seattle Public Schools, where embodiment and care root her personal, poetic, and pedagogical practice. Her debut book, Dear Memphis, will be published by River River Books in January 2024.

Palestine Writes Conference (in Philadelphia)
2023-09-22 - 2023-09-24
Palestine Writes is the only North American literature festival dedicated to celebrating and promoting cultural productions of Palestinian writers and artists. Born from the pervasive exclusion from or tokenization of Palestinian voices in mainstream literary institutions, Palestine Writes brings Palestinian cultural workers from all parts of Historic Palestine and our exiled Diaspora together with peers from other marginalized groups in the United States.

Family Dinner: Palestinian Poetry Feast
2023-10-27 19:00 - 21:00, 2023-10-28 19:00 - 21:00 | the Pantry, 1417 NW 70th Street, Seattle, WA, 98117
Join us for a dinner where we do all the cooking! Each month we open the doors between our classrooms and seat 40 guests for a five-course family-style feast, featuring all the ingredients we’re excited about. And this October we’re hosting another very special dinner, with Nadia Tommalieh taking the lead. We’re excited to welcome local poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha to celebrate her new book “Kaan and Her Sisters” with a menu inspired by her writing. This book of poems is about grief, survival, displacement, and intergenerational memory, following a teacher of Arabic from her origins in Palestine to the cities of the Arab world. It’s a perfect pairing for Nadia’s cooking, which is itself powerfully informed by memories of Palestine — we can’t wait to taste what comes from this conversation. Pricing includes tip, a wine pairing with each savory course, tea or coffee with dessert, and a signed copy of “Kaan and Her Sisters”.

Poets for Palestine: Raising funds for Medical Aid for Palestinians
2023-10-30 12:00 - 14:30 | Virtual
An online evening of poetry, raising funds for Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Special online event with Mosab Abu Toha on Gaza
2023-12-13 11:00 - 13:00 | Virtual
Date: Wednesday, December 13
Time: 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern
Location: Zoom – registration required

Join MECA for this special online event with poet Mosab Abu Toha. The event will honor two dear friends and colleagues Refaat Al-Areef & Doaa Al-Masri who were killed by Israeli attacks several days ago and feature poetry by Refaat as well as Mosab’s own work.

Mosab is the founder of MECA partner the Edward Said Public Library in Gaza. Mosab will be joining us from Cairo to speak about his personal experiences living through seven weeks of Israel’s genocidal attacks.

Register now

Art Reception & Vigil
2024-03-01 17:00 - 20:00 | Suzanne Zahr, Art & Architecture, 2441 76th Ave SE, Ste 160, Mercer Island, WA, 98040, United States
Art Reception & Vigil: Friday, March 1st, 5 – 8PM
Poetry, warm tea & comfort food will be served.
Silent Vigil.
The future is dark. Is this darkness of the tomb – or of the womb? It is both. In all the death and destruction around us, I believe we must find the audacity to lift our gaze and witness the emergence of the new – millions waking to our shared humanity, coming together to grieve and imagine otherwise. In us, I see glimpses of the world waiting to be born. I choose to labor for that world, with you. Let’s last.
Tonight we breathe, tomorrow we push.
– Valerie Kaur

Narratives of Pain
2024-05-31 19:00 - 21:00 | Contact for Location, See above for contact
We are excited to announce our next community event with Narratives of Pain!
Please join Narratives of Pain and Baladna for an evening of healing through the telling and witnessing of stories. Narratives of pain is a unique showcase highlighting the value of collecting gathering and communal witnessing. The Narratives of Pain structure honors both storytellers and witnesses (i.e the audience) with stories that range in subject matter and form, focused on the needs of each person.
It is important that the Palestinian community can come together in a safe, shared space to feel free to open up with the intention to heal individually and collectively. We must take care of ourselves as much as we show up for our community in order to sustain the resistance we are all engaging in daily.
If you are interested in signing up as a storyteller, please contact Zain Shamoon via email at zain.shamoon87@gmail.com

Seattle, WA
Friday, May 31st
7-9
Doors open at 6:30
*This event will take place in Seattle WA, with the exact location being shared the week of the event.

Words for Palestine: Virtual
2024-06-06 16:00 - 17:30 | Virtual
Online via livestream
Free with RSVP
Join our monthly online series “Words for Palestine” which aims to center and highlight Palestinian voices during this devastating time. Featured readers include leena aboutaleb, Summer Awad, Sarah Aziza and Noor Hindi.
“Words For Palestine” is co-sponsored by 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.
For questions, e-mail Rewa Zeinati at rzeinati@accesscommunity.org
leena aboutaleb is an Egyptian and Palestinian writer, asking you to commit to the Palestinian liberation struggle. Read her work at www.leenaboutaleb.onl

Summer Awad is a multi-genre writer with roots in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Nablus, Palestine. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University. In 2023, she was awarded a de Groot Foundation LANDO grant in immigration, migration, and refugee writing for her essay collection in progress about her work in refugee resettlement. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in Adi Magazine, J Journal, About Place Journal, Chapter 16 and others, with poems forthcoming in The Rising Phoenix Review. Her play, Walls, A Play for Palestine, was produced in 2016 at The New York International Fringe Festival.

Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer and translator. Her essays, journalism, poetry, and creative nonfiction have appeared in the New Yorker, the Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, Jewish Currents, Lux Magazine, the Intercept, NPR, and the Nation, among others. She is the recipient of numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a 2022 resident at Tin House Books and a 2023 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Her book, forthcoming in Spring 2025, is a hybrid work of memoir, lyricism, and oral history exploring the intertwined legacies of diaspora, colonialism, and the American dream.

Noor Hindi (she/her/hers) is calling on you to join the global fight for the survival and liberation of Palestinians and all oppressed people. Anywhere and everywhere you are, you can disrupt, advocate, speak out and refuse in small and big ways. Revolution until freedom. Hindi is a Palestinian-American poet. Her debut collection of poems, Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow (Haymarket Books 2022), was an honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award. She is currently editing a Palestinian poetry anthology with George Abraham (Haymarket Books, 2025). Follow her on Instagram @NoorKHindi

Words for Palestine – July
2024-07-10 16:00 - 18:00 | Virtual
Join our monthly online series “Words for Palestine” which aims to center and highlight Palestinian voices during this devastating time. Featured readers include Zein El-Amine, Summer Farah, Zeina Hashem Beck and Kamelya Omayma Youssef. Poet Leena Aboutaleb will be moderating this July

Words for Palestine
2024-08-07 16:00 - 18:00 | Virtual
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

Words for Palestine
2024-10-09 16:00 - 18:00, 2024-11-13 16:00 - 18:00, 2024-12-12 16:00 - 18:00 | Virtual
Join our monthly online series “Words for Palestine” which aims to center and highlight Palestinian voices during this devastating time. Featured readers TBA.
“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.
For questions, e-mail Rewa Zeinati at rzeinati@accesscommunity.org

Palestine on Paper
2024-10-18 14:30 - 18:00 | Virtual
5:30-9 p.m. ET Friday, October 18, 2024
Palestine on Paper
Free with RSVP
Register for in-person event; Register for livestream
Join Visualizing Palestine as they launch their debut book via a panel and one-day exhibit, coupled with the late Rajie Cook’s exhibition, Waiting for Peace, at AANM. More details to come!

National Book Award Winner: Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
2024-12-06 19:00 - 20:00 | Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, 98122, United States
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha reads from Something About Living, her National Book Award-winning third poetry collection.

This event is free and open to the public. Please help us plan for audience size by RSVPing here.
It’s nearly impossible to write poetry that holds the human desire for joy and the insistent agitations of protest at the same time, but Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s gorgeous and wide-ranging new collection Something About Living does just that. Her poems interweave Palestine’s historic suffering, the challenges of living in this world full of violence and ill will, and the gentle delights we embrace to survive that violence. Khalaf Tuffaha’s elegant poems sing the fractured songs of Diaspora while remaining clear-eyed to the cause of the fracturing: the multinational hubris of colonialism and greed.
This collection is her witness to our collective unraveling, vowel by vowel, syllable by syllable. “Let the plural be a return of us” the speaker of “On the Thirtieth Friday We Consider Plurals” says and this plurality is our tenuous humanity and the deep need to hang on to kindness in our communities. In these poems Khalaf Tuffaha reminds us that love isn’t an idea; it is a radical act. Especially for those who, like this poet, travel through the world vigilantly, but steadfastly remain heart first. —Adrian Matejka, author of Somebody Else Sold the World
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist and translator. She is the author of Water & Salt (Red Hen), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award, Kaan & Her Sisters (Trio House Press), finalist for the Firecracker Award, and Something About Living (UAkron, 2024), a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award and winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry. Her writing has been published in journals including Los Angeles Review of Books, Michigan Quarterly Revie, the Nation, Poets.org, and Prairie Schooner and in anthologies including The Long Devotion and We Call to the Eye and the Night. She was the translator and curator of the 2022 series “Poems from Palestine” at the Baffler magazine. She is currently curating a year-long subscription of Palestinian poetry books with Open Books, Seattle’s poetry-only bookstore. For more about her work, visit www.lenakhalaftuffaha.com

Love Letters in the Slanted Season — A Celebration of Palestinian Poetry
2025-02-14 19:00 - 22:00 | Open Books, 108 Cherry Street, Seattle, WA, 98104, United States
“the way love takes you inside its slanted season” — Nathalie Khankan
We can’t stop thinking about the books from last year’s Palestinian poetry subscription, so we decided to have a reading to celebrate them together! On Valentine’s Day, join us to share the love, to read from twelve months-worth of exquisite poems with the series curator Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and Tatreez artist Hala Saleh. And because love is a verb, there will be an opportunity to raise funds for people in Gaza as well.
