October 30, 2020

Mizna: Queer + Trans Voices Virtual Launch

by Lamia Abukhadra | in Literary

Join Mizna for a virtual launch of the summer 2020 issue Mizna: Queer + Trans Voices. Guest-edited by Zeyn Joukhadar, this issue speaks to bodily autonomy, embodiment, and self-determination within a queer, transgender, SWANA, and Muslim lens. Mizna: Queer + Trans Voices bears witness to our rich history, and imagines futures for ourselves. Within these pages, we not only exist, and are loved, and are beautiful; we create magic. We turn our eyes toward worlds of our own making. Read Worlds of Our Own Making, Zeyn Joukhadar’s foreword to Mizna: Queer + Trans Voices here.

Readings from authors Marlin M. Jenkins, Joe Kadi, Nihal Mubarak, Trish Salah, and guest-editor Zeyn Joukhadar will launch Mizna: Queer + Trans Voices right to your home! Order your copy of Mizna: Queer + Trans Voices here.

Missed the launch? Watch the recorded reading here.

>>HOW TO PARTICIPATE<<
In addition to the limited capacity Zoom reading (RSVP required), this event will be livestreamed on Facebook.

>>ACCESSIBILITY<<
This reading will be live-captioned in English, and the full program will be available for viewing post-event.

About the Readers

Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit and currently lives in Minnesota. The author of the poetry chapbook Capable Monsters (Bull City Press, 2020) and a graduate of University of Michigan’s MFA program, you can find him online at marlinmjenkins.com.

Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Map of Salt and Stars (Touchstone/S&S, 2018) and The Thirty Names of Night (Atria/S&S, 19 May 2020), a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), and a member of American Mensa. His work has appeared in Salon, The Paris Review, Mizna, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. The Map of Salt and Stars, currently being translated into twenty languages, was a 2018 Middle East Book Award winner in Youth Literature, a 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist in Historical Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. Joukhadar has received fellowships from the Montalvo Arts Center, the Arab American National Museum, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Camargo Foundation, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

Joe Kadi lives and works in the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region of southern Alberta. An educator and writer, he teaches in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Calgary.

Nihal Mubarak is a Sudanese-American poet, fiction and nonfiction writer whose work centers around themes of home and the African diaspora. She is inspired by writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Yaa Gyasi, Meena Alexander, and Leslie Nneka Arimah. Nihal’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Solidago, The Gordian Review, Copper Nickel, Mizna, and elsewhere. She teaches college English and creative writing workshops and holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College.

Trish Salah lives and writes in Tkaronto/Toronto and is associate professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, Kingston. She is the author of Wanting in Arabic, which won a Lambda Literary Award, and of Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1. She is editor of the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, and is co-editor of a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly on cultural production, and of a forthcoming issue of Arc Poetry Magazine, focused on poetry by trans, Two Spirit and non-binary writers.