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Join us in launching our summer issue, Mizna 23.1. This virtual event features readings by Ibtisam M. Abujad, emet ezell, Malvika Jolly, Nathalie Khankan, and Abu Bakr Sadiq. The summer 2022 issue of Mizna includes a tribute to Etel Adnan, featuring Adnan’s artworks as well as a number of essays, interviews, and reflections on her legacy.

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This event will have live captioning.

ABOUT THE READERS

Ibtisam M. Abujad is a doctoral candidate and instructor of English at Marquette University. Her work exists imprinted in the liberatory folds and on resistant edges, like her positionality as a Muslim and Palestinian refugee, migrant, woman, and mother. She centers intersectional and decolonial approaches in her engagements with Muslim cultural productions and transnational communities. You can find her recent scholarship in Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media and Muslim American Hyphenations: Cultural Production and Hybridity in the Twenty First Century. You can also enter into conversation with her creative works at Cream City Review, Rigorous, The Nasiona, Blue Minaret Literary Journal, Pointed Circle, and most recently Flare: The Flagler Review, among others.

emet ezell wants to understand the relationship between ancestral grief and collective imagination. for emet, the key to this wisdom is devotional attention. born and raised beneath Texas skies, emet inhabits the borderlands between the visible and the invisible. they are the proud recipient of the 2021 Gloria Anzaldúa poetry prize and their debut chapbook, “between every bird, our bones,” will be published by Newfound Press in fall of 2022. emet is a community organizer, an aquarius rising, and a libra sun. when they re-incarnate, emet hopes to become a bird.

Malvika Jolly (b. 1993, Rouen) is an artist, writer, and emergent translator living on occupied Munsee, Lenape, and Wappinger lands in New York City. Her essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in Chicago magazine, The Margins , and South Side Weekly, a Chicago-based alt-weekly where she is a regular contributor focusing on visual culture and community history. From 2020–2021, she worked at the Brooklyn Rail as the Special Projects Associate where she worked on the New Social Environment and curated the Radical Poetry Reading series. She curates The New Third World, a monthly poetry reading series inspired by the Non-Aligned Movement’s dream for the third world.

Nathalie Khankan is the author of QUIET ORIENT RIOT published by Omnidawn, recipient of the 2021 California Book Award in Poetry. She is a lecturer in the Middle East Languages and Cultures Department at UC Berkeley. Straddling Syrian, Finnish, Danish, and Palestinian homes and hemispheres, she now lives in San Francisco.

Abu Bakr Sadiq is a Muslim SFFH poet. His work appears or is forthcoming in Uncanny Magazine, Augur Magazine, FIYAH Literary Magazine, Zone 3 Press Magazine, The Lit Quarterly, Rockvale Review, and elsewhere. He’s been nominated for the Rhysling Award. He writes from Minna. Find him on Twitter @bakronline.

Hannah Sassoon seeks—and seeks to sow—a growing sense of what’s possible through language and play. Hannah lives in New York and works as a gardener in Prospect Park.