6 p.m. ET Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, Zeina Hashem Beck | Live Reading + Book Release
Free with RSVP
Register for in-person attendance OR Register for virtual attendance
AANM presents a live bilingual poetry reading featuring an incredible lineup of poets: Maya Abu Al-Hayyat and Zeina Hashem Beck. Join us as the poets read excerpts from their new works, exploring themes of language and notions of home. Maya’s translated poems will be orated by Writing Fellows graduate Samer Budair. The talkback will be moderated by Sukoon founder Rewa Zeinati.
All AANM guests are required to remain masked and fill out a health screening form upon check-in in order to attend this event.
For questions, e-mail Kathryn Grabowski-Khairullah, Curator of Public Programming, at [email protected].
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is the director of the Palestine Writing Workshop, an institution that seeks to encourage reading in Palestinian communities through creative writing projects and storytelling with children and teachers. She has published four collections of poems, four novels, and numerous children’s stories, including The Blue Pool of Questions and her newest collection, You Can Be the Last Leaf (trans. by Fady Joudah), published by Milkweed Editions. She contributed to and wrote a foreword for A Bird Is Not a Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Poetry, and she is also 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. Abu Al-Hayyat lives in Jerusalem and works in Ramallah.
Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her third full-length poetry collection, O, was published by Penguin Books in July 2022. Her collection Louder than Hearts won the 2016 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. She’s also the author of 3arabi Song, winner of the 2016 Rattle Chapbook prize, There Was and How Much There Was, a 2016 Laureate’s Choice selected by Carol Ann Duffy, and To Live in Autumn, winner of the 2013 Backwaters Prize. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The New York Times, Poetry, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Educated in Arabic, English, and French, Zeina has a BA and an MA in English Literature from the American University of Beirut. Zeina invented The Duet, a bilingual poetic form where English and Arabic exist separately and in relationship to each other. Her poem “Maqam” won Poetry Magazine’s 2017 Frederick Bock Prize. She’s the co-creator and co-host, with poet Farah Chamma, of Maqsouda, a podcast about Arabic poetry. After a lifetime in Lebanon and a decade in Dubai, Zeina recently moved to California.
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