Events

Event details

Free poetry reading and spoon printing workshop sponsored by Mizna, a lit + art organization forerunning the Arab American arts scene.

Workshop — 6:30 pm, with Ana Paula Cordeiro. This free workshop will have attendees create a hand-printed broadside with poetry from Mizna’s literary journal.

Poetry reading — 7:30 pm, with Hala Alyan, Noor Ibn Najam, Zeyn Joukhadar, and Kamelya Youssef.

Sponsored by Mizna, Minnesota-based forerunner in the Arab American arts scene, publishing a lit + art journal since 1999, producing the Twin Cities Arab Film Fest, and other events centering Arab artists.

Hala Alyan is a Palestinian American writer and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Guernica and elsewhere. Her poetry collections have won the Arab American Book Award and the Crab Orchard Series. Her debut novel, Salt Houses, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2017, and was the winner of the Arab American Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her newest poetry collection, The Twenty-Ninth Year, was recently published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Noor Ibn Najam is a Philly-based poet, teaching artist, herbalist, and freelancer. They are a graduate fellow of the Watering Hole and have attended the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and Pink Door writer’s retreat as well as a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. They are a Pushcart nominee with pieces published by such platforms as the Academy of American Poets, the Rumpus, and BOAAT. Noor’s poetry is in the third volume of Bettering American Poetry and Best New Poets 2018 and their chapbook, Praise to Lesser Gods of Love, was published by Glass poetry press in 2019.

Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Map of Salt and Stars (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2018) and The Thirty Names of Night (Atria/Simon & Schuster 2020). His work has appeared in Salon, The Paris Review Daily, Mizna, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. The Map of Salt and Stars, currently being translated into sixteen languages, was a 2018 Middle East Book Award winner in Youth Literature and a 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist in Historical Fiction.

Kamelya Omayma Youssef is a writer from Dearborn, Michigan. She tends to blur the borders between forms and she hopes that one day borders are obliterated entirely. Her poems and lyric essays have been published in Agapé, Mizna, the Michigan Quarterly Review, the captions on her instagram posts, a forthcoming anthology of Arab American literary nonfiction, and on the theater stage. She received an M.A in English from Wayne State University in Detroit and she is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at NYU.

Poetry Is Not a Luxury is curated by Maymanah Farhat, this exhibition is titled after Audre Lorde’s powerful 1977 essay highlighting the intersection of art and activism in diverse spaces. Poetry Is Not a Luxury features writers and authors whose works approach book arts as experimental, subjective, and as media with the ability to draw attention to sociopolitical issues. More information here.