Friday, September 29, 7 pm
This event will be held on Zoom.
Admission: Free, but please RSVP

THIS IS AN OFFICIAL 2023 BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL BOOKEND EVENT

Worker-owned independent publisher Radix Media is proud to bring together a multidisciplinary gathering of Arab American authors for an illuminating, freewheeling panel at the City Reliquary Museum.

In the contentious battleground of political America, Arab American writers have strived to drown out divisive rhetoric through compelling, evocative portraits of life in the Arab world, diasporic ache, and subversion of embedded stereotypes. We meet with five Arab American writers to learn the narratives that guide their work, how they write and recollect in America, and the place Arab American literature occupies in the larger literary zeitgeist.

Featuring authors Andrea Abi-Karam, George Abraham, Sarah Aziza, Zein El-Amine, and Hazeh Fahmy. Poet and author Ghinwa Jawhari will moderate the event.

Artist Bios:

ANDREA ABI-KARAM is a trans, arab-american punk poet-performer cyborg. They are the author of EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019) and with Kay Gabriel, they co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2020). Their second book, Villainy (Nightboat Books, Sept 2021) reimagines militant collectivity in the wake of the Ghost Ship Fire and the Muslim Ban. They are currently working on a poet’s novel.

George Abraham (they/هو) is a Palestinian American poet. Their debut poetry collection Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) won the Arab American Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. They are currently executive editor for Mizna, and are a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, The Arab American National Museum, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, National Performance Network, and more. They are currently co-editing a Palestinian global anglophone poetry anthology with Noor Hindi (Haymarket Books, 2024) and are a Litowitz MFA+MA candidate at Northwestern University.

Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer who splits her time between New York City and the Middle East. She has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, South Africa, and the West Bank, in addition to the United States. Her journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Lux Magazine, The Intercept, The Rumpus, NPR, Washington Post, and The Nation, among others. Previously a Fulbright fellow in Jordan, she is the recipient of numerous Pulitzer Center grants for Crisis Reporting, a 2022 resident at Tin House Writer’s Workshop, and a 2023 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers Workshop.

Zein El-Amine is a Lebanese-born poet and writer. He has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Maryland. His poems have appeared in Wild River Review, Folio, Beltway Quarterly, Foreign Policy In Focus, CityLit, and others. His latest poetry manuscript A Travel Guide for the Exiled was recently shortlisted for the Bergman Prize, judged by Louise Glück. His short stories have appeared in the Uno Mas, Jadaliyya, Middle East Report, Wild River Review, About Place Journal, and in Bound Off. His debut short story collection, Is This How You Eat a Watermelon? was published by Radix Media and was a longlist for the PEN Awards Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Fiction.

Hazem Fahmy is a writer and critic from Cairo. A PhD student in Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University, he runs the literary newsletter wust el-balad, on Substack. His latest chapbook, At the Gates, was published by the African Poetry Book Fund/Akashic Books as part of the 2023 edition of the New Generation African Poets series. His debut chapbook, Red//Jild//Prayer won the 2017 Diode Editions Contest, and his second, Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo was published in 2022 by Half-Mystic Press. A Kundiman and Watering Hole Fellow, his writing has appeared, or is forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2020, The Boston Review, Prairie Schooner, Mubi Notebook, Reverse Shot, and Mizna.

Ghinwa Jawhari is a Lebanese American writer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her debut chapbook BINT (2021) was selected for Radix Media’s Own Voices Chapbook Prize. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, she is the founding editor of Koukash Review. Her essays, fiction, and poetry appear in Catapult, Mizna, The Adroit Journal, Rusted Radishes, The Margins, Narrative, and elsewhere. More at ghinwajawhari.com / IG @bbghanouj