May 19, 2026
Postmortem—An Excerpt from The Skin and Its Girl
by Sarah Cypher
“Postmortem,” an excerpt from Sarah Cypher’s novel The Skin and Its Girl, invites the reader into a mindset where departures from realism enable new linguistic maneuvers, such as subverting calcified stereotypes of Arabs and Arabic speakers in American supremacist culture.
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May 19, 2026
Wahmi—An Excerpt from Conjoined States
by Key K. Bird
An inventive, familial relationship with language is part of “Wahmi,” an excerpt from Key K. Bird’s in-progress novel, Conjoined States. Bird situates us in the prose: “I didn’t know how deeply cultural my family’s usage was, the oaths and the swearing alike, until I started to read fiction by Arab writers.”
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May 19, 2026
Tongues Untethered: Cross-Cultural Writing and Identity Beyond Language
by Elina Katrin
We exist within an indispensable asset—language. Sooner or later though, writers who belong to multiple tongues, cultures, and heritages come across a curiosity: how to break away from English and honor our ancestry through the plurality language asks of us. In this folio, four writers of SWANA heritage —janan alexandra, Key K. Bird, Sarah Cypher, and Elina Katrin—share their strategies for doing just that.
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