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2022 Twin Cities Book Festival Reading

Fine Arts Building, Twin Cities Book Fest, Minnesota State Fairgrounds, 1265 Snelling Ave N, St Paul, MN 55108.
10/15/2022
11:30 AM

Event details

Join us for a reading at the Twin Cities Book Fest!

Ft. Moheb Soliman, Yara Omer, and acclaimed Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat.

When: October 15, 2022 at 11:30am
Where: Fine Arts Building, Twin Cities Book Fest, Minnesota State Fairgrounds, 1265 Snelling Ave N, St Paul, MN 55108.

More information

This reading is co-presented by Milkweed Editions and Mizna and is part of Abu Al-Hayyat’s US book tour, organized by Mizna and the Arab American National Museum.

This engagement is supported by the Arts Midwest GIG Fund, a program of Arts Midwest that is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts

ABOUT THE READERS

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 Books, Cordite Poetry Review, The Guardian, and Literary Hub. Abu Al-Hayyat lives in Jerusalem and works in Ramallah.

Moheb Soliman is an interdisciplinary poet from Egypt and the Midwest who’s presented work at literary, art, and public spaces in the US, Canada, and abroad with support from the Joyce Foundation, Banff Centre, and diverse other organizations and institutions. He has degrees from The New School for Social Research and University of Toronto and lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he was Program Director for the Arab American lit and film organization Mizna before receiving a multi-year Tulsa Artist Fellowship. His debut poetry collection HOMES (Coffee House Press, 2021), explores nature, modernity, identity, belonging, and sublimity through the site of the Great Lakes bioregion/borderland. Moheb has been a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards, Heartland Booksellers Award, and others, and showcased in Ecotone Journal’s annual indie press shortlist and the Poets & Writers annual 10 debut poets feature. www.mohebsoliman.info

Yara Omer holds a BA degree in journalism and communication from Yarmouk University, Jordan, and a masters’s degree in deaf education from the University of Minnesota, US. She has been a teacher of the deaf and hard of hearing since 2008. She lived in Saudi Arabia and Jordan and currently resides in Woodbury, Minnesota. She is fluent in Arabic, English, and American Sign Language; familiar with Jordanian Sign Language, and interested in American Cued Speech. Yara writes in both Arabic and English and enjoys astronomy, horseback riding, and literature. She is published in Mizna, The Fourth River, The Gemini by the Minnesota Astronomical Society, Saint Paul Almanac, and MELSA. Some of her poems were featured in Lina Belar’s community poetry booklet Poems of Hope and Reassurance as well as Minnesota Voices – Work by Regional Poets, presented by the Wadena County Historical Society.