Palestinian novelist and poet, Ibrahim Nasrallah and Professor of Arabic Literature, Huda Fakhreddine will launch their new chapbook Palestinian (World Poetry Books) in a bi-lingual poetry reading followed by a conversation between the poet and the translator in which they reflect on their collaboration and discuss poetry, translation, history, and writing in a time of genocide.

IBRAHIM NASRALLAH is a Palestinian poet, novelist, painter, and photographer. He was born in Amman, Jordan, in 1954 to parents uprooted from their home in Palestine in 1948. To date, Nasrallah has published 14 poetry collections, 2 books of film criticism, and 24 novels, 14 of which make up his epic Palestinian Tragicomedy series covering 250 years of modern Palestinian history. He has won many awards and honors, among them the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (The Arabic Booker) in 2018, the Palestine Prize in 2022, and the Grand Prize for the Novel from the Turkish Authors’ Association in 2023. Nasrallah is the only two-time winner of the Katara Prize for Arabic Novels: in 2016 for his novel The Spirits of Kilimanjaro and in 2020 for his novel A Tank Under the Christmas Tree.

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) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge, 2023). Her book of creative non-fiction titled Zaman s̩aghīr taḥt shams thāniya (A Brief Time Under a Different Sun) was published by Dar al-Nahda, Beirut, in 2019. Her translations of Arabic poems have appeared in Banipal, World Literature Today, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly, Asymptote, and Middle Eastern Literatures, among many others. She is co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures and an editor of the Library of Arabic Literature.