Mizna’s summer journal, Mizna 23.1, features Adnan’s paintings and tapestries and Mizna asked a few writers to join us in honoring her through written tributes. Omar Berrada, one of Adnan’s frequent collaborators, contributes a translated essay, “I followed lines I never saw,” originally written for the catalog of the exhibition Ecrire, c’est dessiner, which opened at Centre Pompidou-Metz in October 2021 and was inspired by Etel Adnan’s idea that “writing is drawing.” Curator Marie-Nour Héchaime interviewed Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige about the making of their film ISMYRNA and their creative relationship with Adnan in an interview titled Looking Through The Eternal Present. Kazim Ali, Youmna Chlala, Lisa Suheir Majaj, and Andrea Abi Karam contributed poetry in the memory of Etel Adnan.

KAZIM ALI was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, including the volumes of poetry Inquisition, Sky Ward, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award; The Fortieth Day; All One’s Blue; and the cross-genre texts Bright Felon and Wind Instrument. His novels include the recently published The Secret Room: A String Quartet and among his books of essays are the hybrid memoir Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies and Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice. He met Etel Adnan in 2008 and became her publisher not long after. He co-founded Nightboat Books and currently is a professor and chair of the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

ANDREA ABI-KARAM is a trans, arab-american punk poet-performer cyborg, workshop facilitator, and activist. Their chapbook, THE AFTERMATH (2016), queers Fanon’s vision of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. Under the full Community Engagement Scholarship, Andrea received their MFA in Poetry from Mills College. With Drea Marina they co-hosted Words of Resistance [2012-2017] a monthly, radical, QTPOC open floor poetry series to fundraise for political prisoners’ commissary funds. Selected by Bhanu Kapil, Andrea’s debut EXTRATRANSMISSION (2019) is a poetic critique of the U.S. military’s role in the War on Terror. With Kay Gabriel, they co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (2020). Chosen by Simone White, Andrea’s second book, Villainy (2021) reimagines militant collectivity in the wake of the Ghost Ship Fire and the Muslim Ban. Villainy is a 2022 Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry.

OMAR BERRADA  is a writer and curator whose work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. Recently, he published the poetry collection Clonal Hum and co-edited La Septième Porte, Ahmed Bouanani’s posthumous history of Moroccan cinema. He teaches at The Cooper Union (New York) where he co-organizes the IDS Lecture Series.

Artist HEBA Y. AMIN engages with political themes and archival history, using mixed-media including film, photography, lecture performance and installation.

Amin is a Professor of Digital and Time-Based art at ABK-Stuttgart, the co-founder of the Black Athena Collective, curator of visual art for the MIZNA journal, and currently sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Digital War. Amin’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions including The Mosaic Rooms, London (2021), the Böttcherstrasse Prize Exhibition, Bremen (2018), Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam (2020), Quai Branly Museum, Paris (2020), MAXXI Museum, Rome (2018), Liverpool Biennial (2021), 10th Berlin Biennale (2018), 15th Istanbul Biennale (2017), and 12th Dak’Art Biennale (2016), to name a few. Furthermore, Amin is also one of the artists behind the subversive graffiti action on the set of the television series “Homeland” which received worldwide media attention.