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Event details

Join Mizna in Seattle for a night of Black SWANA literature and music. Coinciding with the national literary conference in Seattle, AWP 2023, Mizna presents an offsite event to launch the Black SWANA Takeover Issue. This reading will feature guest editor Safia Elhillo as well as Romaissaa Benzizoune, Samah Fadil, and Umniya Najaer. Ladin Awad will be MCing the reading and DJing a dance party to follow.

Join us at the Northwest Film Forum on March 9, 2023, doors at 7:30pm, reading starts at 8pm. Space is limited. RSVP now

COVID SAFETY: NWFF requires masks for all patrons while in the building Read more here: bit.ly/nwffcovidsafety

For AWP attendees, also be sure to catch Mizna’s panel at AWP and visit us and RAWI at Booth 939 in the AWP book fair.

Mizna: Black SWANA Takeover, guest-edited by acclaimed author Safia Elhillo and produced by an all-Black team, explores the infinitely varied and kaleidoscopic nature of the Black SWANA experience. The issue is available for order now here.

ABOUT THE READERS

Ladin Awad is an artist and researcher based in NYC. Raised in the Bay Area by way of Sudan, her work seeks to abstract the narratives and histories through which cross-cultural Black diasporic life is viewed and understood. She is interested in image making modalities that center interiority, subjectivity and world-making, especially as it relates to Black feminist pedagogies.

Romaissaa Benzizoune is a writer and editor from New York City and from-from Morocco. Her work has appeared in outlets including McSweeney’s, Teen Vogue, Observer, and the New York Times. She also writes a Substack column called One Thing and is occasionally funny on Twitter @_asap_ro.

Safia Elhillo is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press), which received the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award; Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House); and the novel-in-verse Home Is Not a Country (Make Me A World/Random House). With Fatimah Asghar, she is coeditor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me(Haymarket Books). Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia received the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.” Her fellowships include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University.

Samah Fadil is an Afro-Palestinian poet, editor, and translator who resides in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Her words can be read in FIYAH, Palestine Square, Skin Deep, Mizna, and more. She was a coorganizer and performer for Global Indigenous Solidarities: a Poetry Reading, in conjunction with Yale University Art Gallery and Yale Native American Cultural Center. Fadil is interested in showcasing Black SWANA experiences through storytelling, poetry, and visual art. She is a Cinephilia Film Development Workroom fellow.

Umniya Najaer is a poet, artist, filmmaker and black feminist scholar. She is invested in exploring radically synergistic ways of being with each other, our world and our cosmos. Her chapbook Armeika was published by Akashic Press in the New Generation African Poets Series.

This event and this issue of Mizna are made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Minnesota Humanities Center, and the City of St. Paul’s Cultural STAR Program. General operating support is provided to Mizna by the McKnight Foundation and by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.