Events
TEXAS Book Festival
Carrying Home: Belonging, Longing, and the Palestinian Experience
What does it mean to carry home when you cannot return? Fady Joudah’s Exhibit G bears witness to the destruction of Gaza through poems, essays, and photographs and reaffirms love as the only defense against a totalizing, destructive force. Zaina Arafat’s poignant memoir Our Arab explores Palestinian life — at home and in exile — forming a complex portrait of identity and belonging under censorship, violence, and erasure. Together, Joudah and Arafat reveal how stories preserve home–even when it is out of reach.
Love, Loss and Longing: Debut Memoirs by Celebrated Authors
Texas Book Festival
Join authors Rachel Eliza Griffiths and Zaina Arafat for a discussion of their poignant memoirs about bearing the emotional scars of personal and collective loss and the arduous path of healing. In The Flower Bearers, Griffiths recounts the devastating death of her best friend as well as the harrowing attack on her husband, writer Salman Rushdie, in a lyrical narrative that highlights the beauty and pain of love and growth. In Our Arab, Arafat reflects on the Palestinian diaspora alongside her personal history and yearning for home, crafting a complex portrait of a people shaped by censorship, violence, and erasure.
Hawthornden Foundation
Reading and conversation with Helen Betya Rubinstein, author of
Feels Like Trouble: Provocations on Writing, Teaching & Power
OUR ARAB @ Politics & Prose
Union Market Location
A reading and discussion of OUR ARAB with writer and Washington Post editor Stephanie Merry.
Riffraff Bookstore + BAR
A reading from OUR ARAB followed by a conversation between the author & writer Erin Vachon.
Boston Book Festival
Memoir: Home and Away, A panel discussion with fellow author Michael Lowenthal, moderated by Tina Cassidy.
Two award-winning fiction writers trace displacement and connection, identity and legacy in their evocative new essay collections. In Our Arab: On Longing, Belonging, and Hope, Lambda Literary Award–winning novelist Zaina Arafat considers the emotional landscape of living in the diaspora as a Palestinian. With essays that move from Nablus to the Appalachian Mountains, Amman to Manhattan, Arafat offers a “beautiful and thoroughly honest meditation on home as both journey and destination” (Omar El Akkad). In Place Envy: Essays in Search of Orientation, Michael Lowenthal chronicles his travels as a queer, agnostic Jewish man—including visiting his grandmother’s German hometown, a love affair in Brazil, living with Amish family in Pennsylvania, playing jazz with Afrofuturist Sun Ra—“all the while asking what world, what place, can hold us all and all that we contain” (Lyz Lenz). Tina Cassidy, Chief Marketing Officer of GBH, will guide this meaningful conversation.
narrating palestine
From workshops to community gatherings, here's what we have coming up. Mark your calendar—we'd love to see you there.