March 18, 2025

Mizna at AWP 2025

by Lamia Abukhadra | in Literary

The 2025 AWP Conference & Bookfair takes place March 26–29, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. Join Mizna for a long weekend of SWANA lit! At this year’s conference, Mizna will present an AWP Featured Event with Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and Mosaab Abu Toha, an AWP offsite event, and panels. Learn more about how to attend the AWP 2025 here.

Mizna + RAWI Booth

Catastrophe + Futurities: A Mizna AWP Offsite Event

Featured Event: Mizna Gathers Lena Khalaf Tuffaha & Mosab Abu Toha in Conversation

Mizna AWP Panel: Arab Time—Hybridizing Form, Language & Temporality

SWANA Panels

SWANA Caucus

Find Mizna + RAWI at Booth #355

Find Mizna journals and merch for the duration of AWP 2025 at booth #355. We’ll be sharing the booth with our friends at RAWI!

AWP SALE: Subscribe to Mizna and get a FREE back issue + a specially printed poem by Randa Jarrar from our forthcoming Futurities Issue!

Catastrophe + Futurities: A Mizna AWP Offsite Event

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, Umniya Najaer, 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 + MORE INFO

Featured Event: March 29, 2025 at 10:35am
Our People Shall Live: Mizna Gathers Lena Khalaf Tuffaha & Mosab Abu Toha in Conversation

As we mourn Gaza’s destruction by the recent campaign of Zionist genocide and watch a tenuous ceasefire evolve under an appalling new threat of American imperialism, we seek voices from Palestine to render, deconstruct, and reimagine these realities and our relationships to them. Toward that, Mizna is thrilled to host a critical conversation and reading with two major Palestinian poets: National Book Award winner Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and acclaimed Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha. The two will share work responding to the ongoing catastrophe and engage in dialogue about Palestinian sumud, literature’s role in resisting genocide, and our collective futures in and beyond the world of poetry.

This event will take place in person in the Los Angeles Convention Center and will be livestreamed for virtual audiences. All livestreamed events include open captions.

Location: Petree Hall C, Level One, Los Angeles Convention Center

Mizna AWP Panel

Thursday, Mar 27, 2025 12:10pm PDT
Mizna Presents: Arab Time—Hybridizing Form, Language & Temporality

To write in relation to Arabic in the US is to confront problematic “East meets West” discourse through contrapuntal processes that unlock entire canons, forms, and genres. Intergenerational Mizna contributors from diverse backgrounds explore how hybrid language generates formal possibility that embraces orality and interrogates homogeneity. Panelists discuss how vast Arabophone traditions provide innovative techniques for attending to narrative structure, time, language, voice, and more.

Speaker(s): George Abraham, Sarah Aziza, Jameelah Lang

Location: Room 511AB, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

SWANA Panels at AWP 2025

March 27, 2025 at 9am PDT
The Velvet Air of Gaza: Protest & Beauty 

This multigenre reading by mostly Palestinian writers focuses on what it means to write in the face of genocide and the global student protests against it. How do our words transcend mere empathy and reach beyond it to achieve active solidarity? What is the relationship between beauty and protest? Between protest and language? How do these relationships inform love in the tradition of Black radical love? Our readings will illuminate some possible answers to these urgent questions of our time.

Speaker(s): Samah Fadil, Samina Najmi, Lena Mubsutina, Deema Shehabi

Location: Room 411, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

March 27, 2025 at 12:10pm PDT
Poetry in Translation: Satisfactions & Discontents 

This panel brings together writers/translators from Iranian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Armenian backgrounds, all living in the American diaspora, and writing in their native tongues and in English. As poets, novelists, and literary scholars, the panelists tackle a wide array of issues, including linguistic transgressions, gains and losses, dual identities, and politics of translation at times of calamity.

Speaker(s): Fatemeh Shams, Ahmad Almallah, Armen Davoudian, Huda Fakhreddine 

Location: Room 513, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

March 27, 2025 at 3:20pm PDT
Theories of Vastness: On Capaciousness in Poetry 

What does it mean for a poetic work to be “capacious”? This term implies an expansiveness of scope and experience—the possibility for the primordial and the vatic to converge, the promise of poem as sprawling event. This panel explores the mysteries of the capacious poem, while demystifying capaciousness from a craft perspective. It asks what craft tools can be brought to bear to enact cultural, linguistic, and spiritual vastness in poetic space.

Speaker(s): Issam Zineh , Kazim Ali, Brenda Hillman, Roger Reeves

Location: Concourse Hall 151, Level One, Los Angeles Convention Center

March 28, 2025 at 10:35am PDT
Sumud Motifs: Woven Inheritances in Arab Visual & Literary Storytelling 

Award-winning Arab, Black, and Indigenous creators are weaving literary and visual elements, rendering multicultural multimedia modalities grounded in sumud/steadfastness and decolonial resistance to oppression. Award-winning Womanist/Queer/Trans creatives will share cutting-edge storytelling structures through graphic novels, installation art, poetry based on Palestinian Tatreez, dance/movement, graphic art, multilingual printmaking, and text within painting/audio/video/visual poetics.

Speaker(s): Doris Bittar, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán,  Marguerite Dabaie,  Samah Fadil,  Micaela Kaibni Raen 

Location: Room 409AB, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

March 28, 2025 at 12:10pm
Beyond a Homeland: Celebrating Iranian American Women Writers 

How do writers make sense of the Iranian diasporic experience? This reading highlights Iranian American women fiction authors, all with incredibly varied connections to Iran. How do their relationships with a homeland that has been taken from them help shape the stories they tell? This is Iran beyond the news headlines. Discussion will follow the reading.

Speaker(s): Shideh Etaat, Jasmin Darznik, Sahar Delijani, Marjan Kamali, Porochista Khakpour 

Location: Room 405, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

March 28, 2025 at 1:45pm
We Are Still Here: A Reading for Palestinian & Armenian Solidarity 

IALA (International Armenian Literary Alliance) presents a reading of multigenre writers of Palestinian and Armenian descent. Their works in prose, poetry, and nonfiction examine culture and heritage in the diaspora despite ongoing campaigns of silencing by colonialist and fascist governments. In the face of exile and violence, our coalition fights for the recognition of our peoples’ safety and autonomy while celebrating writing as a continued form of resistance and survival.

Speaker(s): Gina Srmabekian,  Nancy Agabian, Mai Serhan, Raffi Wartanian, Priscilla Wathington 

Location: Room 501ABC, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

March 28, 2025 at 3:20pm
The Politics of Imagining: Poetry as Social Practice 

The political dimension penetrates every intimate aspect of human life—who is allowed to love whom and on what terms, who lives, who dies. Yet, “the political” is often relegated to a subgenre rather than being seen as the primary field of experience out of which the poetic imagination arises. This panel considers poetry within “a web of other social practices historically weighted with enormous imbalances of power” (Rich) and argues for a liberatory poetics that centers political consciousness.

Speaker(s): Issam Zineh, Courtney Faye Taylor, Cindy Juyoung Ok, Solmaz Sharif, George Abraham

Location: Room 406AB, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

March 29, 2025 at 9am PDT
Behind the Acronym: Empowering Ethnic Voices – Launching a Literary Nonprofit 

What does it mean to be a literary nonprofit dedicated to a specific ethnic group? What are the benefits of highlighting diverse voices within a community that others see as defined by their cultural background? Hear from founders and arts administrators of the International Armenian Literary Alliance, Mizna, and the Radius of Arab American Writers on the importance of visibility, diversity, and practicalities in launching and maintaining a successful nonprofit.

Speaker(s): Arthur Kayzakian,  Shahe Mankerian,  Zeyn Joukhadar, Ellina Kevorkian

Location: Room 515A, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

March 29, 2025 at 1:45pm
Fighting the Muzzle: Literary Organizing for Palestine During Genocide 

The invasion and genocide of Gaza has cost the lives of almost forty thousand Palestinians. In the United States, even acknowledging this unconscionable atrocity has been labeled as “complicated.” The leaders of three prominent Arab/SWANA literary organizations (Mizna, RAWI, and Palestine Writes) discuss the ways they have been silenced trying to promote Palestinian, Arab, and Southwest Asian and North African literature, and the methods they’ve used to break through this silence.

Speaker(s): Glenn Shaheen, Susan Abulhawa, Lana Barkawi, Sarah Aziza,  Tarik Dobbs

Location: Room 408B, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

March 29, 2025 at 3:20pm
Innovations in Arab American Fiction 

A panel of groundbreaking Arab American fiction writers will read their work and discuss the trajectory of their artistic journeys. What is the responsibility of a writer to represent their culture in a society where their people are often maligned and misrepresented? How does the experience of Arab American writers working in fiction differ from other communities in this current cultural moment? 

Speaker(s): Zeyn Joukhadar,  Betty Shamieh, Ghassan Zeineddine, Sarah Cypher

Location: Concourse Hall 150 ABC, Level One, Los Angeles Convention Center

March 29, 2025, at 5pm
SWANA Writers Caucus

This will be a town hall–style meeting, creating a much-needed space for SWANA writers to build and connect within AWP. We invite established and emerging writers, editors, students, scholars, and organizers, and aim for the caucus to facilitate networking and exchange on literary endeavors, craft, publishing, poetics, and praxis. Our caucus seeks to empower and center the voices of underrepresented Americans with roots in SWANA cultures and communities.

Speaker(s): Aliah Lavonne Tigh, Rabha Ashry, Tariq Luthun, Pinar Banu Yasar, Sophia Babai

Location: Room 501ABC, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center