A WGST & Cheuse Salon: SWANA Poetry & Art

Tuesday, October 11, 2022 5:00 PM to 6:15 PM EDT
Art & Design Building, Gillespie Gallery

Co-sponsored with Women and Gender Studies and as part of the Cheuse International Writers Salon Series, join us on Tuesday, October 11th at 5:00pm for a very special event featuring Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat reading form her new book, You Can Be The Last Leaf, translated by Fady Joudah. 

The event will take place in the art building's Gillespie Gallery where the current exhibit, Pressure/Movement/ Effect: New Arabic Calligraphy, features work by Syrian artist Abdulrahman Naanseh, the current GMU School of Art Artist-in-Residence. 

Other readers include poets of SWANA lineage: Zeina Azzam, Danielle Badra, Holly Mason Badra, Zein El-Amine, and Leeya Mehta. 

 

POET BIOS:

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. 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 BooksCordite Poetry ReviewThe Guardian, and Literary Hub. Abu Al-Hayyat lives in Jerusalem and works in Ramallah.

Zeina Azzam is a Palestinian American poet, writer, editor, and community activist. She is currently the Poet Laureate of the City of Alexandria, Virginia, where she also volunteers for local organizations that advocate for the civil rights of vulnerable communities. Her chapbook, Bayna Bayna, In-Between, was released in 2021 by The Poetry Box, which nominated one of her poems for a Pushcart Prize. Zeina’s poems are published or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Passager, Gyroscope, Pensive Journal, Streetlight Magazine, Cutleaf Journal, Mizna, Sukoon Magazine, Barzakh, Making Levantine Cuisine, Tales from Six Feet Apart, Bettering American Poetry, Making Mirrors: Writing/Righting by and for Refugees, Gaza Unsilenced, and others. An advocate for Palestinian human rights and development initiatives, Zeina serves as a mentor for We Are Not Numbers, a writing program for youth in Gaza. She holds an M.A. in Arabic literature from Georgetown University, an M.A. in sociology from George Mason University, and a B.A. in psychology from Vassar College.

Danielle Badra is a queer Arab American poet who was raised in Michigan and currently resides in Virginia. She received her BA in Creative Writing from Kalamazoo College (2008) and her MFA in Poetry from George Mason University (2017). While there, she was the poetry editor of So To Speak, a feminist literary and arts journal, and an intern for Split This Rock. Her poems have appeared in MiznaCincinnati ReviewThe MaynardOutlook Springs, 45th Parallel, The California Journal of Poetics, Duende, The Greensboro ReviewBad Pony, Rabbit Catastrophe Press, Split This Rock, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and elsewhere. Dialogue with the Dead (Finishing Line Press, 2015) is her first chapbook, a collection of contrapuntal poems in dialogue with her deceased sister. Her manuscriptLike We Still Speak, was selected by Fady Joudah and Hayan Charara as the winner of the 2021 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize and published through the University of Arkansas Press fall 2021. It was named a semi-finalist for the Khayrallah Prize and listed in Entropy’s "Best of 2020-2021: Poetry Book & Poetry Collections."

Holly Mason Badra is currently the associate director of Women and Gender Studies at George Mason University. She received her MFA in Poetry from GMU in 2017 and served as the blog editor for So to SpeakAn Intersectional Feminist Journal of Language and Art. Her poems, interviews, and reviews have appeared in various journals, such as: The Northern Virginia Review, The Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, SWWIM Everyday, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, Foothill Poetry Journal, The University of Arizona Poetry Center Blog, Bourgeon Online, Broad Strokes: The National Museum of Women in the Arts BlogOutlook SpringsEntropy, and CALYX. She received a Bethesda Urban Partnership Poetry Prize selected by E. Ethelbert Miller.  As a Kurdish-American poet, she has been a featured reader at annual Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here events and participated in RAWIFest 2021, as well as other events related to Kurdish diaspora writing/writers. She has been a panelist for OutWrite in DC (A Celebration of Queer Literature). She is currently a reader for Poetry Daily. 

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, Graylit, Split This Rock, Penumbra, DC Poets Against The War: An Anthology, Ghostfishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. 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 poetry collection, Is This How You Eat a Watermelon?, was recently published by Radix Media. 

Leeya Mehta is the interim Director of the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center. She is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer and essayist. Her poetry collections are The Towers of Silence, and A Story of the World Before the Fence of which Tim Seibles, former Poet Laureate of Virginia, writes, “is a lush, lyrical study of memory and history.” In 2022 her work has been anthologized in the Penguin Book of Modern Indian Poets and in Future Workan anthology of contemporary Indian writers from Red Hen Press.

Leeya grew up in Bombay, the city on the sea, and the great muse of many a writer. She has a Masters in Philosophy, Politics & Economics from Oxford University on a Radhakrishnan Scholarship that was created in honor of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnanthe second President of independent India. The idealism of India’s birth– in political and individual freedom, in unity in diversity, in non-violent activism, in service – formed the foundation of her own personal philosophy. But it was in writing that Leeya found a place to weave in the paradox of violent beginnings, and the threads of continued brutality that haunt the generosity of time. Her column The Company We Keep, on the reading and writing life, is one of the spaces where she explores these paradoxes, developing thematic connections between writers and cultures from around the world. Imagined Childhoods is a recent essay following the attack on fellow Bombay writer Salman Rushdie on Aug 12, 2022. Other links to her work can be found at https://leeyamehta.com/.

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