La La Lil Jidar and Mizna present:
“What the World’s Silence Says”
A reading with Gazan poet Yayha Ashour
and conversation with Huda Fakhreddine
Plus opening reading with Nada Abuasi,
a local Palestinian student activist/writer/artist
Friday, May 31
Doors + food at 8:00pm
Program begins at 8:30pm
Click here to reserve tickets!
Please join La La Lil Jidar at Studio 34 for an evening of poetry with acclaimed Palestinian poet Yahya Ashour in conversation with writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, Huda J. Fakhreddine. Come early for food and an opening reading with local Palestinian student activist, creative writer, and artist, Nada Abuasi. This event is co-sponsored by Mizna.
Yahya Ashour, born in Gaza City in 1998, is a touring poet and awarded author. In 2022, he became a fellow in writing at the University of Iowa. His recent poetry e-book, titled “A Gaza of Siege & Genocide,” was published by Mizna in March 2024. Ashour has also authored a poetry collection and a children’s book in Arabic, along with contributing to numerous printed anthologies and online journals worldwide. His works have been translated into several languages, including English, French, Spanish, Italian, Finnish, Portuguese, Japanese, Norwegian, and Bengali. Ashour has conducted numerous creative writing workshops for children and youth in Gaza. Since October 2023, he has presented his poetry and talked about Gaza at several organizations and approximately 30 universities across the United States, including prestigious institutions such as Princeton, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern, Columbia, Cornell, University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, and University of Michigan.
Huda J. Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015), The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge, 2023). Her book of creative non-fiction titled A Brief Time under a Different Sun was published by Dar al-Nahda, Beirut in 2019.
Nada Abuasi is a Palestinian creative writer, artist, poet, and currently a master’s student in Communications, Culture, and Media.
Mizna is a critical platform for contemporary literature, film, art, and cultural production centering the work of Arab and Southwest Asian and North African artists. For more than twenty years, we have been creating a decolonized cultural space to reflect the expansiveness of our community and to foster exchange, examine ideas, and engage audiences in meaningful art. See more at mizna.org.