Join us for a virtual Pride event with authors, Mona Eltahawy, Rabih Alameddine Zaina Arafat, Zeyn Joukhadar, Randa Jarrar, and Hasan Namir.
About this event
Join us for a special pride event as Mona Eltahawy (author of The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls [1] ) convenes a panel of LGBTQIA authors from the Middle East, North Africa and of Arab descent to discuss writing between identities. Produced with the Feminist Giant [2].
In Rabih Alameddine’s forthcoming novel, The Wrong End of the Telescope [3], a Lebanese doctor arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp and forms a bond with a Syrian matriarch.
In Zaina Arafat’s debut novel, You Exist Too Much [4] a young Palestinian-American woman is caught between, cultural, religious, and sexual identities.
In Zeyn Joukhadar’s magical realist novel, The Thirty Names for Night [5] three generations of a Syrian family are linked to a mysterious species of bird.
Hasan Namir’s children’s book The Name I Call Myself [6] follows, Ari a young person who doesn’t like their birth name Edward, as they grow up navigating the ins and outs of gender identity.
Randa Jarrar’s Love is An Ex-Country [7] is a memoir of a cross-country road trip that offers a bold look at domestic violence, single motherhood, and sexuality through the lens of the punished-yet-triumphant body.
This is a FREE event. At checkout, you can make a donation to Feminist Giant to support their vital work to make feminist knowledge available to everyone. This event will be held on Zoom and will be streamed on The Strand’s Facebook page [8].
FEMINIST GIANT is a newsletter that publishes weekly, original essays by Mona and twice weekly global roundups of feminist resistance by interns Inaara Merani and Samiha Hossaini.
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide.
Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays as FEMINIST GIANT, which is also the name of the newsletter of which she is founder and editor-in-chief.
Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels An Unnecessary Woman; I, the Divine; Koolaids; The Hakawati; and the story collection, The Perv. In 2019, he won the Dos Passos Prize. His novel The Wrong End of the Telescope will publish this September.
Zaina Arafat is a LGBTQ Palestinian-American writer based in Brooklyn. Her debut novel, You Exist Too Much, was selected as an Indie Next Pick for June, and has been praised by O Oprah Magazine, Vogue, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, NPR, LitHub and Good Morning America. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications including Granta, The New York Times, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, VICE, BuzzFeed, Guernica and The Atlantic. She holds an MFA from Iowa and an MA from Columbia, and was awarded the 2018 Arab Women/Migrants from the Middle East fellowship from Jack Jones Literary Arts. She teaches writing at Long Island University and the School of the New York Times, and is currently working on an essay collection.
Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Map of Salt and Stars and The Thirty Names of Night. The Thirty Names of Night won the 2021 Stonewall Book Award and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Awards finalist; The Map of Salt and Stars, currently being translated into twenty languages, was a 2018 Middle East Book Award winner and a 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist. Joukhadar’s work has appeared in Salon, The Paris Review, Shondaland, [PANK], and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. He is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and a mentor with the Periplus Collective, as well as the guest editor of the 2020 Queer + Trans Voices issue of Mizna.
Iraqi-Canadian author Hasan Namir graduated from Simon Fraser University with a BA in English and received the Ying Chen Creative Writing Student Award. He is the author of God in Pink (2015), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Fiction and was chosen as one of the Top 100 Books of 2015 by The Globe and Mail. His work has also been featured on Huffington Post, Shaw TV, Airbnb, in the film God in Pink: A Documentary, Breakfast Television Toronto, CTV Morning Live Saskatoon. He was recently named a writer to watch by CBC books. He is also the author of poetry book War/Torn (2019, Book*Hug Press), children’s book The Name I Call Myself (2020, Arsenal Pulp Press) and Umbilical Cord (Book*Hug Press). Hasan lives in Vancouver with his husband and their child.
Randa Jarrar is the author of the novel A Map of Home and the collection of stories Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Salon, Bitch, BuzzFeed, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a Creative Capital Award and an American Book Award, as well as awards and fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, Hedgebrook, PEN, and others. A professor of creative writing and a performer, Jarrar lives in Los Angeles.