Associate Director of Women and Gender Studies Holly Mason Badra recently published a multi-genre anthology showcasing the work of contemporary Kurdish women and nonbinary writers living all over the world.
Sleeping in the Courtyard: Contemporary Kurdish Writers in Diaspora (The University of Arkansas Press, 2025) and Holly's work was recently featured in The Kurdistan Chronicle and elsewhere.
Other interviews and reviews include:
Washington Independent Review of Books, October 2025
Washington Unbound, November 2025
The Markaz Review, November 2025
Kürd Araştırmaları (in Turkish), February 2026
Mizna's Favorite SWANA books of 2025
Mason Badra's fall events included readings and talks at Politics & Prose, Brookline Booksmith, George Mason University, Montgomery County Public Library, RAWIfest, Scuppernong Books, amongst others.
Upcoming events this spring include visits at/with the Rutgers Institute for Research on Women, Harvard, and Nashville Radical Library.
“Sleeping in the Courtyard moved me in ways I didn’t expect. As a Kurdish woman, so much of what’s in these pages felt like home. Each piece carries the weight of memory, exile, and identity, but also the beauty of our language, our stories, our resilience. This collection doesn’t just speak to the Kurdish experience—it honours it. It’s raw, lyrical, and necessary. I’m proud to see these voices brought together, and I know they’ll stay with me for a long time. The title Sleeping in the Courtyard made me feel a sense of temporary refuge, a place that isn’t quite home, but holds a moment of safety, of reflection, and it took me back to sleeping in the courtyard back home during hot summer months.”
—Payzee Mahmod, Girl’s & Women’s Rights Campaigner
To hear from Holly and contributors within the anthology, tune into this virtual event hosted by the GMU Women and Gender Studies program Tuesday, March 31st 12:00-1:15pm.
“As a Palestinian American writer, I have long searched for reflections of my own fragmented lineage—this anthology gave me that and more. Sleeping in the Courtyard is more than an anthology—it is a reclamation. At once fierce and tender, the collection defies monolithic portrayals of Kurdish identity and instead renders a chorus of nuance, complexity, and lived truth. From the ruins of Halabja to the rooftops of Baghdad, from the quiet defiance of translation to the unbreakable thread of community, this anthology is a testament to the power of writing as cultural survival—and as revolutionary act. Curated with deep care and transnational breadth, Sleeping in the Courtyard invites readers into a space of shared breath, radical empathy, and collective remembrance. It is a door flung open. A night under the stars. A home built from story. This is not just a collection—it’s a homecoming, a collective heartbeat, a defiant archive of what refuses to be erased.”
—Etaf Rum, author of Evil Eye
February 10, 2026