Events

Event details

The 2024 AWP Conference & Bookfair takes place February 7–10, 2024 in Kansas City, Missouri.

As a featured event at this year’s AWP, Mizna hosts two critically acclaimed Egyptian writers, poet Iman Mersal and poet-novelist Noor Naga in a reading and conversation with Mizna’s Executive Editor George Abraham. The dialogue will explore the ways inherent transnational and multilingual trajectories of the poets’ lived experiences affect their writing. What roles can Arabophone literature play in shaping the future trajectory of poetry in and beyond English?

When: Saturday, February 10, 2024 at 12:10pm
Where: Ballroom B, Level 2, Kansas City Convention Center

Learn more about how to attend AWP 2024 here.

About the presenters

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian Canadian writer. Her nonfiction book Traces of Enayat received the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in Literature. Her poetry collection The Threshold, translated by Robin Creswell, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the 2023 National Translation Award.

Noor Naga is an Alexandrian writer who was born in Philadelphia, raised in Dubai, studied in Toronto, and now lives in Cairo. Her verse-novel Washes, Prays (2020) won the Arab American Book Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her debut novel If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, won the Graywolf Press Africa Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and was a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Finalist among other honors. Her work has been published in Granta, LitHub, Poetry, BOMB, the Walrus, the Common, the Offing, and more.

George Abraham (they/هو) is a Palestinian American poet. Their debut poetry collection Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) won the Arab American Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. They are currently executive editor for Mizna, and are a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, The Arab American National Museum, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, National Performance Network, and more. They are currently co-editing a Palestinian global anglophone poetry anthology with Noor Hindi (Haymarket Books, 2024) and are a Litowitz MFA+MA candidate at Northwestern University.