An Interview with Susan Muaddi Darraj, editor of 

Ask the Night for a Dream: Palestinian Writing from the Diaspora

How did you come to editing this anthology? Who were the guides, teachers, guardian angels, or ancestors who brought you here?


In 2021, I agreed to serve as the Director of Palestine Writes Press. It is a small independent book publisher that seeks to platform Palestinian voices in the diaspora and to highlight our experiences and cultural expression. It was always one of our goals to assemble an anthology of these voices, so I was excited to put the call out for submissions. It was even more exciting to review the many manuscripts that were sent to us for consideration.

I began working in earnest on the anthology shortly after the second annual Palestine Writes Festival, which was held in Philadelphia in 2023. It was an amazing, immersive weekend with some of the luminaries of our literary and artistic community. I think I was filled with the spirit of family, joy, and creativity after that weekend, and I brought that to my curation of the anthology.



2. What do you write/edit/curate towards? What do you write/edit/curate against?


I tried to offer a balance between established and emerging voices in this book: for some of these authors, this is their very first time being published, and that makes me proud. I curated a sense of inclusivity. Palestinians in the diaspora have a range of experiences, based on nationality, class, gender, and many other factors. I also tried to establish a sense of the diversity of genres in which our community writes: fiction, memoir, poetry, TV scripts, drama, and more.



3. How did you find the title of this anthology? What kinds of negotiations were involved—with yourself, the work, the publisher, or the world?


I always liked that line from Darwish, and I thought it speaks to the ways in which Palestinians have to fiercely protect our dreams.



4. We would love to know a little about your process of editing? Did anything about the experience surprise you?


I truly was surprised by the range of genres that were submitted to us. As you see, we have everything from fiction to TV scripts to personal essays to, of course, poetry. I was thrilled to see names that I had never heard before, and to read their work. I was very honored that they trusted us with their precious words, and I hope that the writers feel that we did justice to their vision in this book.

I was surprised by how long it took the book to be completed. This was not anyone’s fault but mine, but then again, we are a press that operates on a purely volunteer effort. However, what actually made it difficult to work was the ongoing genocide. I felt it was impossible to focus on creative writing, on assessing and editing this work, when I, like everyone else, was subjected to daily videos of pure horror coming out of Gaza. Therefore, the book took a lot longer to complete than I had intended, but the contributors were very patient and understanding. In some ways, it felt like we were all grieving together, and thus allowing each other the space to process and mourn.



5. How do you want this work to be read? What do you most wish for from your reader?


It’s funny: when Palestinians meet one another, even for the very first time, it only takes a few minutes for us to establish a warm connection in the interaction. I’m hoping to replicate that immediate connection here. I want readers to feel like they have landed among family and friends when they pick up this book. I want them to open the book to any random contribution and sit with that writer for a while, to see the world through their eyes, to experience their creativity, and to feel that instant bond.



6. Since this series is called Zaghrouta!, we want to know: how are you honoring/celebrating this anthology’s birth? How would you like us to honor/celebrate with you?


It’s hard, of course, to truly celebrate anything in these horrific times, but I want to honor these writers who continue to narrate their own stories, who continue to write and share their work, despite all the efforts to silence Palestinian voices. Every day that we survive, that we continue to write, that we continue to exist should be celebrated. It is remarkable that we endure, and yet, that is the Palestinian way.


***

is an award-winning writer of books for adults and children. She won an American Book Award, two Arab American Book Awards, and a 

 Independent Artists Award. In 2018, she was named a 

. Her books include her linked short story collection, 

 children’s book series. She lives in Baltimore, where she teaches creative writing at 

, was published in January 2024 by HarperVia. It received praise from 

The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, 

 and it was named a Best Book of 2024 by 

ZAGHROURTA!: Ask the Night for a Dream: Palestinian Writing from the Diaspora, from Palestine Writes Press

I had so much fun compiling a list of anticipated SWANA releases for RAWI 

, and several of the books I wrote about for that list turned out to be among my absolute favorite reads of recent years — Munir Hachemi’s 

 were particular standouts. This year, there is once again a rich collection of new releases by SWANA authors that I can’t wait to spend some time with in 2025.

There are many firsts in this list — debuts, first forays into new genres, first works in English, etc. — as well as many familiar voices. I’m also excited to see how many of these books offer really new and innovative sorts of stories, reflections, and poetics. As SWANA literature in English expands every year, it is always wonderful to see it move in new directions and push the limits of the types of stories we can tell (and have published) further and further.

This piece covers 31 particularly exciting releases from January-June of 2025, broken down into fiction (including YA), non-fiction, and poetry. I hope to be back in July to cover more new releases for the latter half of the year! As always, both the books selected for this preview and the consideration of what falls under “SWANA literature” are meant to be expansive and inclusive but not comprehensive.




 and I’m a huge supporter of poets writing novels generally, so 

 has been on my radar for a while. I’m excited to finally get a chance to read it and have seen a lot of early praise so far! A messy coming-of-age story of an Afghan girl growing up in Berlin, this story seems both familiar and wholly original.



Another debut novel by a writer who works in multiple genres — this time a playwright! If you enjoyed Isabella Hammad’s recent novel 

, the plot of this book, where a diaspora Palestinian helps put on a Shakespeare play in the West Bank, might seem a little familiar. But this book has a lot else going on, including arranged romance, family sagas, and relationships between mothers and daughters. It looks like a fun read!



This may be my personal most anticipated book of the year. A story of grief, political history, feminism, family secrets — this book seems to have everything I usually look for in a novel. Rakha has written many novels originally in Arabic, but I believe this is his first English language novel, and I look forward to digging into its pages.



I am cautiously intrigued by this novel, which offers a humorous take on a project of ISIS bride deradicalization from an author who worked on similar projects as an academic before leaving her former career. Since my own academic work focuses on critical terrorism studies and critiques radicalization and deradicalization theories and tactics from a gender studies perspective, I perhaps have a particular investment in this topic! But this is certainly a new sort of story, and I’m interested in what it has to say.



Amal El-Mohtar co-authored the hugely popular speculative queer romance-adjacent novel 

, but this is her solo debut and it looks excellent. Like 

, it’s a speculative novel, but leans more into fantasy/fairytale than sci-fi, and tells an enchanted and mysterious tale of sisterhood.



Laila Lalami has written across many genres including historical fiction, mystery, and non-fiction, but I believe this is her first outwardly speculative/SFF book. Despite the speculative landscape of a near-future where the main character is detained based on analysis of her dreams, Lalami’s narrative remains a deeply familiar one, tackling pervasive technology, surveillance, and state control.



A family saga centered on the chaotic, brilliant, beautiful lives of women is a classic format of the SWANA-American literature genre (if such a thing exists), but each take on it is different, funny, lovely and all of them feel sort of like being at home. 

 looks like a great debut novel and an excellent addition to the SWANA women family saga canon.



As an LA-based SWANA current PhD student, I may be a bit biased when I say this, but this novel about an LA-based SWANA recent PhD grad embarking on a project to marry rich looks SO fun. I can’t wait to read this one! If it’s as good as it seems, I already know what I’m getting all my PhD friends for Christmas next year…



Like many of this year’s novels, this book feels like a totally new and a little bit out-there kind of story in the best way. Characters whose cult-like love of Kafka leads them to join a resistance movement and attempt an assassination? What more could you ask for! Though Sönmez has written many books in Turkish, this is his first Kurdish language novel, perhaps a salient addition to its political themes.



Another exciting new family saga, this novel about an Armenian family from Beirut centered around the Lebanese Civil War has at least a superficially similar premise to one of my favorite novels of the last few years, 

 by Hala Alyan. There’s few things I like more in a book than a funny, sad, complicated story of multiple generations grappling with war, displacement, and personal struggles, so I’m really looking forward to reading this one.



This is the third installment of Huda Fahmy’s YA graphic novel series and it grapples with a high school-aged main character dealing with her parents’ divorce. It’ll always be amazing and brilliant and cool to me that books like this exist (even more so when they’re graphic novels!) for SWANA young people in ways that felt so out of reach when I was that age not all that long ago!



The second book in Chelsea Abdullah’s fantasy series, 

, is finally coming out this year and continues the story of Loulie, a merchant in a world where jinn are hunted, who gets sucked into complex power struggles. This second book finds Loulie trapped in the realm of jinn and promises chaos, magic, and intrigue. As always, I’m happy to see more SWANA authors producing “Arabian fantasy” works that are grounded in actual histories and cultural mythologies when so much of the genre’s popularity has happened without SWANA authors at the helm.



Jackie Khalilieh’s second YA romance novel looks really charming and fun and exceedingly relatable. Who amongst us hasn’t been a type-A Arab girl with anxiety and chaotic insecurity about dating? One day, hopefully soon, we will get an Arab girl To 

-style teen romcom film adaptation and I think Jackie Khalilieh’s work might just be what gets us there.



 by Yigit Karaahmet, trans. Nicholas Glastonbury 

I’m not usually a big reader of thrillers, but this book, which combines messy love triangle drama with crime, might just be the exception. I’m totally intrigued by the plot and like many of the novels coming out this year, this story feels genuinely fresh and new to the landscape of SWANA lit. Extra exciting that it’s in translation! This one is definitely on my list.



Yet another really innovative story, this book follows a young Somali woman living in London who is transported into an alternate reality where she witnesses the life she would have lived had her parents never left Somalia. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen themes of diaspora, displacement, alternate forms of belonging tackled in such a direct and speculative way, and I find the approach really refreshing!




Hot Date!: Sweet & Savory Recipes Celebrating the Date, from Party Food to Everyday Feasts

I am on record saying that no SWANA books list would be complete without a cookbook, and this year that role is fittingly filled by a date-based cookbook. This book also promises snippets of historical context about the history and use of dates from SWANA to Palm Springs, which is particularly intriguing to me because I 

 about this very history a couple years ago. I also admitted in that poem that I’m not a big dates fan, but I do love a good dates-based dessert, so I’ll have to give this one a try.



Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal

Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims builds on work he’s been producing for years, and particularly over the last year, which explores the limits of how Palestinians and the Palestinian struggle are perceived and made legible. El-Kurd writes in the tradition of Edward Said’s formative work “Permission to Narrate,” expanding an essential critique for our time.



One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Omar El Akkad’s non-fiction debut, prompted by bearing witness to the genocide in Gaza as well as El Akkad’s long career as a journalist, attends to the profound alienation many of us are too familiar with by now, of existing in a country which would seek to kill you if you were on the other side of a border, and will probably still seek to kill you slowly on this side of it. It asks if and how we might seek possibility in a desperate time.



I know Roza Nozari’s beautiful art from instagram but am not yet familiar with her writing. This memoir looks really exciting! I’m especially enamored with the concept of a memoir that is also about someone else, Nozari’s mother, and how she seeks to weave her own history and her mother’s history together to explore belonging, queerness, exile, love, and the stories we tell about all of it.



How precious and lucky that we still get to experience new Etel Adnan book releases after her passing. Published in what would have been her 100th year, this book combines three essays of Adnan’s written between 1984 and 1995 and reflecting on her life in and beyond Beirut. I know that her words will resonate with our current realities and keep her present with us in times of disaster.



The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders

I’m really excited for Sarah Aziza’s debut book — her essays and published letters to George Abraham since the start of the genocide have been both such a balm and an unsettling. Her writing on Palestine always challenges me and gives me new ways of thinking and being in community. I expect her memoir, on personal and familial traumas, eating disorders, and the echoes of history in the body, will continue to do just that.



Forgotten: Searching for Palestine’s Hidden Places and Lost Memorials

, this book, co-written with his wife Penny Johnson, promises to be a brilliant reflection on Palestinian history and existence that is deeply grounded in place and in the landscape of Palestine. Amidst so many powerful books on Palestine coming out recently, I haven’t seen a ton of talk about this one yet, but I hope it’s on everyone’s radar!



Hala Alyan is one of my very favorite writers of both poetry and fiction, so I’m thrilled to see her make her non-fiction debut. If her often very personal poetry is any indication, her memoir promises to be a stunning, devastating, sharp book with absolutely magical prose. There’s something very special about seeing an author tackle similar themes across three genres, feeling the familiar contours of narrative laid over distinct forms.




What I love about Farid Matuk’s poetry is how he writes with such precision and attention to language, sound, and the narrow space of the line. This is especially true in 

 from which this new collection draws its title, so I really look forward to seeing where he takes these sounds and feelings.



 by Nasser Rabah, trans. Emna Zghal, Khalid Al-Hilli, Ammiel Alcalay

Translated poetry so rarely gets the attention it deserves, so I hope everyone will check out this bilingual edition of Nasser Rabah’s poetry, the first full translation of Rabah’s work into English. This book combines previously published works from his Arabic collections with new poems written since October 2023, chronicling the unfolding genocide. You can get a taste of some of Rabah’s poetry 

This year’s poetry releases include a ton of debuts or first US publications from SWANA poets and janan alexandra’s come from is one such debut I’m personally really excited for. alexandra’s poetry is really playful with language and often moves fluidly between English and Arabic to destabilize both, such as in 

. I can’t wait to have the space of a full-length collection to dig into her work!



Mandy Shunnarah’s debut poetry collection is coming out with Diode this spring and looks to be another treat in Palestinian poetry this year. I love how 

 plays with form, drawing on the structure of the play to build a poetic scene, and I look forward to seeing where the rest of the book carries these themes and this style.



Dark Star Requiem in the Key of Nova by Hind Shoufani

US-based readers may be more familiar with Hind Shoufani’s work in film — she co-wrote the wonderful 2020 Palestinian short film 

 — but she is also a poet with several previous works published in Beirut! This will be her first collection published in the US, and its poems cross time and geographies as an ode to place, exhaustion, grief. I love how her long, winding, irreverent poems 

 suck you in and I can’t wait to see more of this in her collection.



This anthology has been a long time in the making and I know that when I finally get to read it, it will fill me with every human emotion. George Abraham and Noor Hindi are brilliant editors who have thoughtfully collected poems from numerous Palestinian writers, known and unknown, living and martyred. Can’t wait to hold this beautiful collection in my hands.



Shameless self-promo moment — my own chapbook is coming out this year! It’s about and after the X-Files, if you’re into that sort of thing, but also if you aren’t. The brilliant Jane Wong says of the chap: “From the X-Files to familial inheritance to questioning the self/selves to the terror of the surveillance state, each poem acts as a kind of ghostly guide through what makes us both alien and human.” For a preview, 

Fargo Tbakhi is one of our greatest living poets without a full-length collection, but that tragedy will soon be made right with the release of 

 this June. Tbakhi writes with an unmatched political precision and poetic inventiveness, pushing form and language to their limits. There are many poems I could point to that support this claim - 

 I so look forward to digging into this collection, which I know will challenge me and sit close to the heart.


 (she/her) is calling on you to join the struggle for the liberation of Palestine and all oppressed peoples globally, from wherever you are, in whatever material way you can. To learn from Palestinian resistance the everyday practice of refusal. She is writing from somewhere in Los Angeles, where she is a PhD student in American Studies & Ethnicity. Her poems appear in Apogee, AAWW, Mizna, and elsewhere, and her debut chapbook is forthcoming with Game Over Books in 2025. Find her on twitter @sa_miathrmoplis.

In the first half of 2025, new SWANA releases give us fresh types of stories and approaches! 

31 New SWANA Books in 2025: January-June Releases

 nears its end, an unexpected death occurs. The elderly character in question was taking a bus ride in Detroit when he breathed his last. This person would go routinely to the airport to see passengers arrive on the flight from Lebanon, his homeland. As I read about the character’s death, I was on a bus myself. I put the book down in my lap and realized that I had been crying. The person, an immigrant, had died alone while trying to catch a glimpse of new arrivals from the old country. I thought of my own father.


Like Fatima Abdullah, the tale’s octogenarian protagonist, I was in Los Angeles as I finished reading the book. Fatima decamps to the west coast from Michigan after divorcing her second husband, Ibrahim. She hopes this act will spare him from having to live out their last years together in what she believes to be a marriage he agreed to only out of a sense of obligation upon the death of Marwan, her first husband and Ibrahim’s friend. Fatima takes up residence in the home of her grandson Amir, whose queerness she initially refuses to acknowledge, leading to many comedic moments. 


Like Fatima, in a place famed for its car culture, I took the bus everywhere in the City of Angels and happened to be on one of the routes the book mentions as I read about the death of the old Lebanese character. The bus route referenced passes a 7-Eleven on Wilshire Boulevard, a place my dad 

. That was in 1969, before the political instability, before the refugee crisis, before a long list of events…


 in 2009, the year of its publication, little did I know that the book would become one I would use in my classes so consistently. The text has been a staple on the syllabus of my course titled Outside In: Transnational Asian American Literature. The premise of the course is this: moving away from the idea of Asian Americans as those solely of immigrant heritage, the class asks students to think about what it might mean to consider such literary subjects as being the product of displacement within and beyond the United States. Concurrently, the course also asks students to dwell upon the involvement of America beyond its own borders.


The class requires that every text we read involves the crossing of a nation-state’s boundary, often of a character who is identifiably Asian or Asian American. Thus, when not viewed as being only immigrant (or descended from immigrants), how might we see the construction of Arab and other Asian (American) characters as also being influenced by transnational histories and events? In other words, what happens when one looks beyond the purview of a single nation or the state to understand identity?

Certainly, the most transnational figure in 

 fame. But where she is the teller of stories in the original text, here, in her appearance in this non-Arab setting, she is the receiver of tales about Fatima’s family. The exchanges between the two women are the framing device for the novel, within which is ensconced several other stories. In this way, Yunis’ novel not only makes 

 an intertext, but also echoes the earlier book’s form of intertwined stories in this 21st century version. In so doing, 

 brings the Asian literary form of a framing narrative with other stories within it to an American setting. Before Disney and before orientalist adaptations of Scheherazade’s tales, the legends themselves originated 

, including Iran and the Arab world, as well as South and East Asia.


An early-twentieth-century immigrant to the United States along with Marwan, Fatima’s time in the new country parallels the durée of her fellow-Lebanese and other Arab communities in America, an immigrant history that is 

. In her mid-80s at the time at which she tells her stories to Scheherazade, Fatima recounts for this legendary figure how she, Marwan, and Ibrahim endeavored to acculturate in an unfamiliar land with an unfamiliar language. After all, Fatima had only known a rural life in a small Lebanese village prior to America. Entwined in her stories are legacies of labor struggles, racism and Islamophobia, and intergenerational conflict.


The stories Fatima relays to Scheherazade include accounts of how Marwan and Ibrahim both worked in the burgeoning industries that marked the rise of capitalism in America, chief among them the 

. Fatima recounts the injuries immigrant men faced in unregulated factories, leading to the 

struggle for unionization and labor rights-protections

 that Marwan and Ibrahim find themselves involved with, too.


Because of the many children Fatima had between her two marriages, the novel is a multigenerational family saga, one that is replete with the expected conflict between immigrant parents and their American-born progeny. However, Yunis weaves into these parent-child tussles a bit of the history of the settings in which these events unfold. One such poignant moment ensues during a family road trip which Ibrahim only agrees to after being nagged by his most malcontent child, Randa, who wants the Abdullahs to do things like other Americans.


Stopping at a restaurant in Georgia on their trip, the Abdullahs are faced with the choice of entering one of two bathrooms – one for whites and the other for “coloreds.” At the restaurant, a white man unable to identify Randa ethnically calls her the prettiest mulatto he has ever seen. The cringe-worthy moment makes Ibrahim vow that the family will never vacation again.


As with the previously mentioned history of labor rights-organizing that impinges upon the lives of the first generation in the novel, the history of segregation and anti-Black racism reveals itself in the existence of the second-generation characters. Subtly, the novel portrays the history of the Abdullahs – internal conflicts and all – as one that cannot be separated from American histories of marginalization, institutionalized as they are by society, capitalism, and the state. Nevertheless, the most overt encounter the family have with such state power is in the discovery that they are being racially and religiously profiled in the contemporary moment of the novel’s setting, a subject I will return to soon.


Although Lebanon seems to recede into the backdrop of the family’s history in the novel as the Abdullah’s children and then their children’s children are born in America, readers are constantly reminded of the home country. Apart from the old character who dies on the bus en route to see the planes arrive from Lebanon, it is Fatima herself who is always thinking of Lebanon. Because of Scheherazade’s visitations, Fatima believes she only has 1001 nights remaining on Earth and thus becomes obsessed with figuring out to which of her descendants she will bequeath her village house upon her death.

While Fatima never returns to the homeland, the most unlikely of characters does. It is Fatima’s white-passing granddaughter Dina Bitar, the Texas-born, part-Palestinian child of Randa’s (who belatedly goes by “Randy” to also appear white). On a foolhardy mission to impress an Arab American college activist she becomes infatuated with, Dina joins the fuckboy at a refugee camp in Lebanon where for the first time she encounters a community of other diasporic Palestinians like (and definitely unlike) herself.


In this, the most evidently transnational moment in the novel, one that my students find elucidative of the course’s themes, the All-American Dina (a cheerleader, no less) comes face-to-face with the effects of state-sponsored violence on people with whom she shares an origin. One of the refugees, a seamstress named Sarah, produces a document to show Dina – it is the deed to the woman’s house in Palestine. Just before an Israeli airstrike occurs and Dina and the others have to evacuate the camp, the Palestinian woman confides that she lives with the hope that, one day, she will return to her own country. This year, after (unbelievably) the one-year anniversary of the genocide of Gazans that began on October 7, 2023, teaching this novel has had profound resonance. It has revealed to my students that persecution against Palestinians is not a recent phenomenon; rather, it continues to divest many of their homeland as the world looks on.


Indeed, the question of where one’s home is is a persistent theme in 

. This is a query the Abdullahs find themselves faced with when it becomes clear that they are being targeted by their own government because they are Arab Muslims in post-9/11 America. This, after four generations of the family have been in the United States, with a fifth-generation-child soon to arrive. State surveillance is the unknown soundtrack to the family’s lives as the crackle of static interferes with telephonic conversations. In fact, this is why their relative – the old person on the bus – dies alone and away from the family. The character’s repeated attempts to reach the family are thwarted by phone taps authorized by the government. It is state-sanctioned Islamophobia and racism that gets in the way of this character being with his kin in his final moments.


 brings together themes of state persecution, familial conflict, transnationalism, and Arab American history, but it also has a strong feminist perspective. Fatima’s house in Lebanon – the one she never sees again – was a gift to her from her mother, one that would allow Fatima to have a place to return to should things go awry in America. This matrilineal offering is in keeping with Scheherazade’s own legacy. As we may recall, the storyteller offered herself up in place of her sister, Dunyazad, who was to marry King Shahryar. The reason Scheherazade wished to replace Dunyazad was because the marriage meant certain death, the king finding little reason to prolong his unions were he to be displeased in the least with his brides. It is Scheherazade’s enchanting storytelling (the basis of 

) that causes Shahryar to fall in love with her, thereby keeping her and other women from being murdered.


While I tell my students that this is proof enough of the power of literature to save lives, the other lesson one learns is that Scheherazade grapples with state power, as represented by the king, through the use of culture (and wins). Arguably, Scheherazade’s story ends with the preservation of heteropatriarchy and not with the demise of the king (or the state). Yet, in demonstrating that stories and their telling preserve heritage while state-sanctioned violence looms, both 

 and its ancient inspiration ask us to consider how even those made marginal hold on to what is most important to them and preserve it by passing it on in the stories they tell for more than a thousand and one nights. 


 was born in Kuwait and has lived and worked in Asia, Europe, N. America, and Oceania. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies at William & Mary and winner of the Jinlan Liu APIA Faculty Research Award. Ferrão’s academic writing appears in 

Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication

 among others. His fiction and creative nonfiction can be read in 

. He is also a regular contributor to the journalistic platform 

"This year, after (unbelievably) the one-year anniversary of the genocide of Gazans that began on October 7, 2023, teaching this novel has had profound resonance." 

Stories versus State: A Reflection on Alia Yunis’ The Night Counter



“All the poplars and my ancestor’s solemn orchard

Were, I swear, smiling at me with Arab affection.”



Twelve months after Israel began its annihilation campaign of Palestinians in Gaza, the steadfast, larger-than-life journalist, Bisan Owda, asks the soul question of the year—

who are the caretakers of Palestinian earth?

 As she pans her camera out, she points to the Mediterranean Sea and the palm trees dotting a refugee camp in Khan Younis, where Palestinian children move their bodies along a breezy lilt in their teacher’s voice. The teacher calls, they respond, she calls again—children respond in the long Palestinian breath we call home. The children, like the roving protagonist in Layla ‘Allush’s poem, reflect a childhood quintessence— namely, the freedom to give and receive joy. For a moment, the genocide collapses as they raise their autonomous voices to sing, and the land, momentarily languorous, expands with their song. This phenomenological moment captured by Bisan is also sacramental because it harkens back to a past (and subsequent future) where Palestinian children lived (and will live) in the luxuriance of childhood. 

When these unfiltered images echo and ricochet across the planet, I recognize in them a visual periphery of my reason for being. This past year, I reconstructed memories of my childhood, imagining them to be small, linked gardens or little Edens extending into adulthood, where I could take my fill of love despite the daily brokenness. A few months ago, I saw a photograph of our family home in Gaza, and it was still standing. I ran my eyes over the lone, sunburnt cypress tree, the grapevine, and the terrace decorated with orange-black tulip tiles. Every inch of it is a repository of belonging. What’s a house but an extension of the collective body? What’s a body but an extension of God?

It's human (though privileged) to feel despair, especially when images of massacred babies, children, fathers, mothers, grandfathers, and grandmothers come at us incessantly, especially when we witness entire generations of Palestinian bloodlines being erased, especially when bunker busters rip the earth, killing indiscriminately and causing craters the size of little villages. The violence of colonialism seeks to recalibrate our existence and break our longstanding, centuries-old relationships with places and lands to which we belong. Capitalism tells us that it doesn’t matter who you are as long as you accrue capital. It doesn’t even matter if the property you own is ancestral; the only thing that matters is ownership (often theft) instead of belonging. 

Everywhere we look, we are assaulted by values forced on us by Western necro politics though we see past their perfunctory hypocrisies. Muslim feminist scholar Fatima Mernissi says that Western societies dominate with a narrowly constructed definition of time, which consists of seemingly innocuous evaluations, inventories, and measurements. The colonialist obsession with inventory symbolizes ultimate control—the more you know about a people, the more control you exert over them. Mernissi even refers to this construction of time as an insidious kind of imperialism. For the West, time ushers in ‘progress’, a euphemism for wealth accrual, while simultaneously marching those it colonizes (including the earth) toward death.

As Israel increases its aggression against Lebanon, a displaced Lebanese woman remarks that the Israelis bombing Beirut, “may be masters of the sky, but we are masters of the earth.” When the oppressed remind those drunk with power and avarice where real power resides, a certain continuum of time (and its system of oppression) collapses into the ether.

Even though time dominates, I argue that we are living in a time of preternatural changes. A new paradigm of time can be born because death machines are not sustainable, because there’s an intergenerational shift in thinking about war and genocide, and because youth have a profound disagreement with their elders about the degraded environment. And if we listen to the land reflecting the voices of our children, we’ll know the answer to Bisan’s essential question, w

ho are the caretakers of Palestinian earth?

 Yes, they’re the ones smiling at us with affection.




***

 is a Lebanese writer and visual artist. Her book 

 won the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. Free Palestine.

The earth is witness both to current events and toward the future/those who honor the earth. I illustrated this idea through the poppies, half turned toward the current and half turned toward a glow emanating from the future/horizon. Was thinking about how these poppies have endured and witnessed so much since antiquity and continue to grow through, and after, and into the future.

A Palestinian American poet on a year of genocide

On the Past, Future, and the Singularity of Belonging 

1. How did you come to writing? Who were the guides, teachers, guardian angels, or ancestors who brought you here?

I have loved to read since childhood, but really took to poetry in high school when I wrote a research paper on Sylvia Plath’s poem “Tulips.” It was the first time I really lived in the world of a single poem for an extended period of time. I loved the experience of finding and checking out every book about Plath from my town library, and trying to contextualize the poem within what I was able to learn of her life and work. It brought poetry alive and made it feel serious and important. In college, I was lucky to have an encouraging teacher early on, the brilliant poet and translator Whitney DeVos. She introduced me to the work of Natalie Diaz and Claudia Rankine, and made it feel possible to devote myself to a life in writing. I look to Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Parveen Shakir, Etel Adnan, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Mahmoud Darwish as ancestors and guides.

2. What do you write towards? What do you write against?

I write towards the untouchable and unknowable divine. I write against silence and erasure.

3. How did you find the title of this book? What kinds of negotiations were involved—with yourself, the work, or the publisher?

The moment I encountered the word theophanies for the first time I knew it would be the title. I don’t remember the moment of encounter, but I remember clearly the conviction that followed—it was completely natural, as though there had never been and could never be any other options. I never questioned it, and my publisher didn’t, either. When I’m stuck, I still sometimes write the title “Theophanies” at the top of a page and see what happens. I think I could write into that title for the rest of my life and not be done with it.


4. We would love to know a little about your process of writing 

. How much planning vs discovery was involved? Did anything about the experience of writing or revising surprise you?

It was almost entirely discovery. I originally set out to write a very planned book about something else entirely, but every poem I wrote was stale and absent of risk or real emotion. I felt compelled at some point to write into my namesake, the matriarch Sarah, and when I finally gave myself permission to write a persona poem in her voice—the result of which is the poem “Annunciation”—it unlocked a new obsession. The most surprising part of revision once the book was accepted for publication was how painful the experience was, how much it hurt to reread and relive the hurt that led to the writing of certain poems. The things they grieved—patriarchal teachings, domestic violence, loneliness—didn’t stopped being relevant for me just because the book was done.

5. How do you want this work to be read? What do you most wish for from your reader?

I want it be read with generosity, an open mind, and a willingness to learn. I come to poetry to be challenged and to learn new words, concepts, and ways of seeing. I hope readers will take the time to explore new-to-them narratives about figures they might think are solely Biblical. I hope they’ll google what they don’t know rather than assume that their not knowing means this work isn’t for them. Please join me in my love of cross-narratives, and of the many valences of a story, dear readers!

6. One of the central tenets of RAWI's mission is promoting literary engagement with

SWANA writers. Are there any SWANA writers, past or present, who you feel have not received the readership or critical attention that they deserve?

As a South Asian, Muslim writer, I feel much kinship with my SWANA peers. Some contemporary SWANA poets I’ve encountered and been lucky to befriend / admire / learn from are Lubna Safi, Summer Farah, Hajjar Baban, Ladan Osman, Saba Keramati, and Sadia Hassan.


 we want to know: how did you celebrate this book's birth? How would you like us to celebrate with you?

I celebrated with my nearest and dearest friends, with a book cake, and with a beautiful launch in a beloved bookstore. I celebrated with my daughter, an infant, and cherished seeing her little hands try to turn the book’s pages. I would love for you to celebrate with me by paying a visit to your favorite tree and telling it hello from me, or by requesting 

 is a poet, teacher, and editor. She is the author of 

 (Alice James Books, 2024), selected as the Editors' Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award. A Stadler Fellow and recipient of 

 poetry prize, her work has appeared in 

The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review,

 series, and other publications. She is the poetry editor for 

 and lives in the Bay Area, California.


"I write towards the untouchable and unknowable divine. I write against silence and erasure."

ZAGHROUTA!: Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali

It is too late in this genocide to use more words when a few will do, or to withhold or delay all that we might offer each other from our hearts and hands. My heart breaks for how this world keeps us from each other, through labor or borders, by miles or money or bombs.

May any words you write or speak this month, to yourself or others, pull you closer to life—from rubble, from loneliness or desolation—and out of despair. Whatever you might say in your life, do not delay it. Do it now. Say it now.

Take 15 minutes or 30 minutes to try any of these. An hour if you really want to.

But no more than that in one sitting or per day.

May you find renewal, refreshment, good grounding in these practices.

offered in courage, with deep care, R. A.

Week one: Writing ourselves into the living archive

So many prompts are about content or form. I invite you to write about purpose, context, and curation this week. Be as specific as you dare. You have permission to be intimate, ambitious. See references below for texts you might write with or against.


Who do you trust to help you mean what you mean even more and express it more like you want to?

How would you like to be nourished by this work?

What fulcrum do your words lever against, and what do you seek to move by this effort?

What archives do you want your work to sing inside?

What would it mean to be published if there were no paper or websites?


(for even more, read through posts tagged here https://lithub.com/tag/open-letter/)

 An Update on the Boycott and Holding Cultural Institutions Accountable

Palestinian campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel 

Week two: Writing for ourselves and others

Write once for just you. What do you need to say most right now that you’re holding back, censoring, editing or softening. Or if softness is what you’re holding back, let yourself melt as much as you are able.


Write a second time for people you know, the people you share your daily life with, the people you talk to, the people closest to you—and these may not all be the same people, even if they overlap. Tell them what is obvious to you, everything that is so plain inside your skin or in the world that you might assume it doesn’t need saying or that they already know or understand or have heard it and agree. Say it anyway, directly, say it openly, say it plainly or elaborately, say it exhaustively. You are allowed to take this risk.


Write a third time into the world beyond who and what you know. Grow “what you know” and consider that your idea of limits on action, reach, impact might be bigger than you know. Whether you embrace uncertainty or push toward something new, stretch a bit. See how wide you can get.

 Let words live in relationship. Let words take up physical space!

Choose at least one thing from any of these prompts and share it with someone, anyone. Could be as a poem or just in conversation. Could be in a meeting or at a protest or action. Could be in a letter or work email, over dinner or the phone. Read on a streetcorner, send voice notes of you reading poetry to friends, post a poem on a wall, try wheatpasting, print zines and hand them out to strangers or leave them on a table at a school/library. Testify at a city council meeting!


Link to Palestine zines to print or paste from:

: Collection of Palestine Solidarity Zines 

Week three: Honoring anger and grief, peeling the layers with a freewrite

Who are the people you’re offering care to?

 Practice grieving, by yourself or with others, online or in person. Plan a memorial ritual

Practice embracing uncertainty as possibility. Perhaps anxiety isn’t exactly excitement, but perhaps there are ways to embrace paradoxical sources of energy to move outwards/forwards/through rather than feeling trapped, pinned, detained by despair or desolation. As much as you feel able and willing, ask some of the questions you don’t know the answer to yet. Let possibility bloom in that silence rather than certain doom. What is needed to nurture such possible flowering, fruits, harvests, or even jailbreaks?

Try a shared version of this, with one person or with a group.

You can create new writing for this or use this method to revise existing work

1. Easy to understand: speak plainly what you most long to say right now.

2. Harder to understand: rewrite it as something baroque, obtuse, vague, hidden, oblique, opaque.

3. Start a fight: rewrite as a cruel truth, something rude, insulting, unfair, or hurtful.

4. Avoid a fight: rewrite it to be very kind, polite, or careful.

5. Comfort yourself: rewrite it as what you most need to hear/read, what you’re waiting for

6. Discomfort yourself: rewrite it as what you would do anything to avoid admitting

7. Revise it to help someone else, using only a remix of what you’ve written in the above versions.


The Manifesto of Hope and Dignity, the Unity Intifada

A high-contrast black and white photo in which a genderqueer Palestinian person is leaning to the right and staring sidelong at the viewer against a dark background with graffiti. They are wearing black lipstick, large cat-eye glasses, a grey and black rippled scarf, and have long hair with a pale streak in front.

Rasha Abdulhadi. Photo courtesy of the author.

Rasha Abdulhadi is calling on you—yes you, even as you read this—to renew your commitment to refusing and resisting genocide everywhere you find it. May your commitment to Palestinian liberation deepen your commitment to your own. May your exhaustion deepen your resolve and make you immovable. May we all be drawn irresistibly closer to refusals that are as spectacular as the violence waged against our peoples.

Prompting us toward resistance & refusal, toward honesty & action

For the last three years, I’ve collaborated with my friend, fellow writer, and RAWI board member Summer Farah to write fun, casual reviews of all the books we read by SWANA authors throughout the year. As a result of working on that list, I’ve spent recent years trying to read more new releases by SWANA authors alongside the older works I haven’t yet gotten around to. I love to see how the landscape of our art is always changing and opening up new genres, forms, and narratives.

It’s consistently challenging to find books by SWANA authors advertised widely, and even harder to find them consolidated in a list that I can comb through to find my next read. Last year, I put together a quick informal list of all the new releases I could find (24 in total) in an effort to make it a little bit easier for myself and others to delve deep into the realm of contemporary SWANA literature. This year, I took it up a notch.

Below are 32 books in English by SWANA authors coming out in just the first half of 2024. These works span many categories, including fiction, poetry, nonfiction, fantasy, YA, and cookbooks. This list is expansive but, of course, not exhaustive. Whether you’re a SWANA reader looking for some resonance and familiarity in a moment marked, like much of our histories, by immeasurable violence and loss from Sudan to Palestine, or you’re a non-SWANA reader looking to help us honor our stories, welcome. I hope you find something you love.

a colorful horizontal bar made up of the covers of 8 books of fiction by SWANA authors.

This novel traces the fallout of an unnamed war through the people of a town whose lives are profoundly disrupted. Its poetic language and familiar emotional landscape sound deeply engaging for anyone who likes hard-hitting literary fiction exploring the impacts of violence.