Events

Event details

To kick off AWP 2025, join us in celebrating Mizna’s dual launch of the Catastrophe and forthcoming Futurities issues of our literary journal.

Featured readers include Randa Jarrar, Nancy Kricorian, Yahya Ashour, Sarah Aziza, Summer Farah, Gina Srmabekian, Alia Taqieddine, and Pınar Banu Yaşar.

This event takes place on Wednesday, March 26, 2025 at 7pm at The River, 2929 Knox Avenue, Los Angeles, California, 90039.

Doors will open at 6:30 and space is limited. We strongly encourage RSVPing, but walk-ins will be welcome if space is available.

Tickets are free; please pay what you can to support Mizna!

TICKETS

 

If you are attending AWP, we invite you to visit Mizna and RAWI at the AWP book fair (booth #355), at the Mizna featured event with Mosab Abu Toha and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha on Saturday, March 29, 2025, and at the Mizna panel on Thursday, March 27, 2025. Be sure to check out the SWANA Caucus on Friday, March 28, 2025.

 

ABOUT THE JOURNALS

Catastrophe

Mizna 25.1 reflects on the various catastrophes our communities have faced and grieved in the past year while celebrating their abilities to continue resisting, loving, and pursuing liberation. Order your copy here.

Futurities

Mizna 25.2 invites you to face the status quo governing our present, exercise your imagination, and invoke alternative worlds. Mizna: Futurity is guest edited by Barrak Alzaid and Aram Kavoossi.

 

 

ABOUT THE READERS

Yahya Ashour | يحيى عاشور is an exiled Gazan poet and awarded author, born on April 22, 1998, based in the US. He is an honorary fellow at the University of Iowa and the author of the e-book A Gaza of Siege & Genocide (Mizna, 2024). Ashour’s portfolio also includes poetry collections, children’s books in Arabic, and contributions to global anthologies and journals, including MQR and ArabLit. He has received multiple scholarships and fellowships and has read poetry at over 50 U.S. organizations and universities, including Princeton, Stanford, UPenn, and UCLA. His poetry has been translated into several languages, including Spanish, French, Japanese, and Bengali. Ashour studied Sociology & Psychology and worked as a creative writing mentor.

Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer and translator. Her essays, journalism, poetry, and creative nonfiction have appeared in the New Yorker, the Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, Jewish Currents, Lux Magazine, the Intercept, NPR, and the Nation, among others. She is the recipient of numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a 2022 resident at Tin House Books and a 2023 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Her book, forthcoming in Spring 2025, is a hybrid work of memoir, lyricism, and oral history exploring the intertwined legacies of diaspora, colonialism, and the American dream.

Summer Farah is a Palestinian American writer from California. The author of the chapbook I could die today and live again (Game Over Books, 2024), she organizes with the Radius of Arab American Writers. She is calling on you to recommit yourself to the liberation of the Palestinian people each day.

Randa Jarrar is a Palestinian artist, author, professor, and actor based in Los Angeles.

Nancy Kricorian is the author of four novels about post-genocide Armenian diaspora experience, including The Burning Heart of the World, which will be published in April 2025. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, The Markaz Review, Witness, and other journals.

Gina Srmabekian’s work grapples with transgenerational trauma, memory and identity. She is the winner of Ninth Letter’s 2023 Literary Award for Creative Non-fiction and a 2024 Words of Witness Fellow at Under the Volcano. Her work can be read in Ninth Letter and DIAGRAM Journal. She lectures at CSUN.

Alia Taqieddin is a multimedia storyteller with roots in Palestine and Syria, via Jordan and Seattle, Washington. Working primarily with audio, her work can be found at the Arab American National Museum, Arab.AMP, KALW Radio, and MyKali Magazine, and elsewhere.

Pınar Banu Yaşar is a Kurdish poet, with publications in various journals and anthologies. They are a Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize Finalist, a Poetry Online Launch Prize Finalist, and founded the Kurdish Poets Collective. Since 2019, they have received repeated support from Kenyon Review WW and Tin House Summer Writing Workshop.