The Cheuse Salon at BloomBars: Maya Abu Al-Hayyat
Monday, October 10, 2022 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM EDT
BloomBars: 3222 11th Street Northwest Washington, DC 20001
BloomBars and the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center are pleased to bring Maya Abu Al-Hayyat to Washington, DC.
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is a Palestinian poet whose American debut is You Can Be the Last Leaf, translated from the Arabic and introduced by Fady Joudah. She will read her poems in Arabic. City of Alexandria Poet Laureate, Zeina Azzam, will read Maya's translations in English. They will both be joined in a conversation by Megaphone Prize winner, Zein El-Amine.
BloomBars is an artist and non-profit incubator, performance space, art gallery, theater, dance studio, screening room, youth academy, and center for health, wellness, and community engagement. Established in 2008 in Washington, DC’s burgeoning Columbia Heights neighborhood, BloomBars is driven by a volunteer team of artists, educators, and community and business leaders.
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is the director of the Palestine Writing Workshop, an institution that seeks to encourage reading in Palestinian communities through creative writing projects and storytelling with children and teachers. She has published four collections of poems, four novels, and numerous children’s stories, including The Blue Pool of Questions. She contributed to and wrote a foreword for A Bird Is Not a Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Poetry, and she is also an editor of The Book of Ramallah. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cordite Poetry Review, The Guardian, and Literary Hub. Abu Al-Hayyat lives in Jerusalem and works in Ramallah.
Zeina Azzam is a Palestinian American poet, writer, editor, and community activist. She serves as the Poet Laureate of the City of Alexandria, Virginia, for 2022-25. Her poems and essays are published in over fifty online and print literary journals, magazines, anthologies, and edited volumes including Poem-a-Day of the Academy of American Poets, Split This Rock, Pleiades, Mizna, Sukoon, Voice Male, Bettering American Poetry, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume IX: Virginia, Making Mirrors: Writing/Righting by and for Refugees, Making Levantine Cuisine: Modern Foodways of the Eastern Mediterranean, and Gaza Unsilenced. Her chapbook, Bayna Bayna, In-Between, was published in 2021. She holds an M.A. in Arabic literature from Georgetown University and an M.A. in sociology from George Mason University.
Zein El-Amine is a Lebanese-born poet and writer. He has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Maryland. His poems have appeared in Wild River Review, Folio, Beltway Quarterly, Foreign Policy in Focus, CityLit, Graylit, Split This Rock, Penumbra, DC Poets Against the War: An Anthology, and Ghostfishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. His latest poetry manuscript A Travel Guide for the Exiled was recently shortlisted for the Bergman Prize, judged by Louise Glück. El-Amine was awarded The Megaphone Prize awarded by Radix Media for his collection of short stories titled Is This How You Eat A Watermelon, which will be published in October 2022. El-Amine’s short stories have appeared in the Uno Mas, Jadaliyya, Middle East Report, Wild River Review, About Place Journal, and in Bound Off.
