4 – 6 p.m. ET Saturday, April 26, 2025
Zawaya Book(s) Launch: The Latest from Arab American Writers
In-person at AANM
FREE with RSVP; Register
Zawaya, meaning “corners” in Arabic, is where edges, lines and sides meet. This book launch event celebrates a number of works published in the last year that touch on intersectionality and explore new literary corners with a panel conversation moderated by artist-in-residence Mariam Bazeed. Authors include Hadeer Elsbai, Laila Lalami, Tarik Dobbs and Youssef Rakha. Come for new books & fresh perspectives.
Zawaya: The Latest by Arab American Writers is an independent event organized to celebrate new works by Arab American authors. This event is not affiliated with or associated with the Arab American Book Award program. The two events are distinct, and participation in Zawaya does not imply any involvement with or recognition from the Book Awards program.
About the Authors and their Books
Following up on one of the most exciting fantasy debuts, The Daughters of Izdihar, Hadeer Elsbai concludes her Alamaxa Duology—inspired by Egyptian history and myth—with a tale of magic, war, betrayal, sisterhood and love.
Hadeer Elsbai is an Egyptian American writer and librarian. Born in New York City, she grew up being shuffled between Queens and Cairo. Hadeer studied history at Hunter College and later earned her Master’s degree in library science from Queens College, making her a CUNY alum twice over. Aside from writing, Hadeer enjoys cats, iced drinks, live theater and studying the 19th century. The Daughters of Izdihar is her first novel.
From Laila Lalami—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist and a “maestra of literary fiction” (NPR)—comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.
Laila Lalami is the author of five books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s, the Guardian, and the New York Times. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles.
Tarik Dobbs’s work explores surveillance, queerness, disability, race and working-class identity in post-9/11 America. As an Arab American writer, Dobbs is achingly familiar with the power dynamics, violence and capitalistic undercurrents woven through the language of the colonizer. They challenge this power in visual, free-verse and formally intense poems—both traditional and innovative—that stretch the elasticity of borders, verbs, images, redactions and more. Ranging from sonnets to concrete poems, Nazar Boy is visually stimulating, thought-provoking, emotionally wrenching and exquisitely crafted.
Tarik Dobbs (b. 1997, Dearborn, MI) is a writer, artist and Poetry Foundation Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. Dobbs is the director of poetry.onl and has served as a guest editor at Mizna and Zoeglossia: A Community for Poets with Disabilities. Dobbs holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Minnesota and an M.F.A. in art, theory, practice from Northwestern University. Dobbs is assistant professor of English in creative writing at Southwest Minnesota State University. The debut poetry collections by Dobbs, Nazar Boy (June 11, 2024) and Dearbornistan (2026), are from Haymarket Books.
Amna, Nimo, Mouna—these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son, Nour, ascends to the attic of their house where he glimpses her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 1950s, a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo, a self-made divorcee and a lover, a “pious mama” donning her hijab, and, finally, a feminist activist during the Arab Spring. Charged and renewed by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister—who has been estranged from Mouna and from Egypt for many years—in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed. Hallucinatory, erotic, and stylish, The Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom and political agency.
Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian author of fiction and nonfiction working in Arabic and English. He is the author of the novels The Book of the Sultan’s Seal and The Crocodiles, which are available in English, and Paulo, which was on the longlist of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2017 and won the 2017 Sawiris Award. His work has appeared in publications such as the Atlantic, Bomb, GQ Middle East and more. Youssef is the only child of a disillusioned communist and a woman who struggled against incredible odds to go to university. He lives with his own family in Cairo, where he was born and raised. Among other things, he has worked as a photographer, cultural journalist, literary translator and creative writing coach.
For questions, e-mail Rewa Zeinati at [email protected]
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