Voices From the Palestinian Diaspora
2:30 pm – 4:00 pm
Lord Baltimore Hotel
Baltimore Theatre – Mezzanine
PARKING
Download a map here.
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Like any identity, the Palestinian one is not monolithic. The richness and diversity of Palestinian culture both in Palestine and across the diaspora is celebrated and platformed in this panel.Palestinian, poets, memoirists, novelists, and activists read from their work and discuss the ways in which articulating Palestine and Palestinian identity in the western world is fraught with challenges, but also joys. Najla Said is an actor, playwright and author of Looking for Palestine-Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family. This memoir, a Publishers Weekly (starred review), explores her coming-of-age as a Christian Arab-American on New York’s Upper West Side with a focus on the personal rather than the political, broadening the appeal of Said’s book beyond any particular ethnic, cultural, or religious audience. Issam Zineh is a Palestinian-American poet, editor, and public health worker. Author of Unceded Land, he lives in Baltimore, MD. Sahar Mustafah is the author of The Beauty of Your Face, “a story of survival and hope, forgiveness and connection,” named a 2020 Notable Book and Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review and was a finalist for the 2021 Palestine Book Award. She writes and teaches outside of Chicago. Moderator, Diya Abdo is a Palestinian professor, activist, writer and the founder and director of Every Campus A Refuge. Her book American Refuge: True Stories of the Refugee Experience deemed “Empathetic and caring, Abdo’s expert writing conveys the nuanced stories of people whose lives have been heartwrenchingly upended, and who are doing what they must to survive and rebuild.” (Booklist), was selected as a 2024 North Carolina Reads Book.
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Najla Said is an actor, playwright and author. Her solo show, Palestine, had a sold out off Broadway run in 2010, and she has performed it at over 50 colleges, high schools, institutions and events all over the world. In 2013 she published a memoir (Looking For Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family) based on her play that is currently a part of many school curricula. In 2010 she was named one of the “Forty Feminists Over Forty” by The Feminist Press. Najla has written two librettos which have been performed at Carnegie Hall and all over Europe, notably at the BBC Proms and Salzburg Festival. As an actor she has performed Off Broadway as well as regionally in multiple productions, and had the privilege of working with Vanessa Redgrave on a theatrical adaptation of the memoir A World I Loved (written by Najla’s Lebanese grandmother) which they performed in the UK, Beirut and New York. Recent TV and Film credits include: NCIS: New Orleans (CBS), New Amsterdam (NBC) and Feud (FX).
najlasaid.com
X: @najlasaid1
Instagram: @kittybubble
Issam Zineh is a poet, editor, and public health worker. He is author of Unceded Land, a Trio House Press Editors’ Selection and finalist for the Trio Award, Housatonic Book Award, and Balcones Prize for Poetry. “He undertakes the intricate work of naming the beautiful and the brutal around us, and what a lush music he’s made…Inventive, propelled by both the divine and the impossibly human, these poems are a profound and breathless truth,” says author, Ruth Awad. He is a Los Angeles-born Palestinian-American who has lived in places with deep histories of colonial and racial violence. His work is acutely conscious of the erasure of indigenous communities and the impacts of transgenerational trauma traceable to geographical, political, and cultural displacement. His writing appears in AGNI, Columbia Journal, The Yale Review, The Hopkins Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal where he received the 2024 Majda Gama Editors’ Prize, and elsewhere. He lives on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Piscataway and the Susquehannock people (aka Baltimore, MD).
www.issamzineh.com
X: @izineh
Sahar Mustafah is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, an inheritance she explores in her fiction. Her debut novel The Beauty of Your Face was named a 2020 Notable Book and Editor’s Choice by New York Times Book Review and one of Marie Claire Magazine’s 2020 Best Fiction by Women. It was long-listed for the Center for Fiction 2020 First Novel Prize, and was a finalist for the Palestine Book Awards. Her short story “Star of Bethlehem” was awarded the Lawrence Prize for Best Fiction by Prairie Schooner, and her short story “Tree of Life” won the 2023 Robert J. DeMott Prize. Her recent fiction is featured in Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction and The View from Gaza published in The Massachusetts Review. She was awarded a 2023 Jack Hazard Fellowship from New Literary Project and an Illinois Arts Council Grant. Mustafah writes and teaches outside of Chicago.
www.saharmustafah.com
Instagram: @saharmustafahwriter
Diya Abdo is the Lincoln Financial Professor of English at Guilford College and the founding Director of Every Campus A Refuge (ECAR). A second-generation Palestinian refugee born and raised in Jordan, Diya’s work focuses on Arab women writers, Arab and Islamic feminisms, and refugee issues. Diya has published poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her book American Refuge: True Stories of the Refugee Experience was selected as a 2024 North Carolina Reads Book. In 2015, inspired by Pope Francis’ call on every European parish to host one refugee family, Diya founded ECAR which advocates for housing refugee families on college and university campus grounds and supporting them in their resettlement. The flagship chapter at Guilford College is now one of many ECAR campuses across the nation which have collectively hosted over 600 refugees and supported their integration into local communities. Diya has received an Emerson Collective Fellowship (2024), the J.M. Kaplan Fund’s Innovation Prize (2021), and several higher education engagement awards.
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CityLit Project in partnership with Lord Baltimore Hotel and Red Emma’s present CityLit Festival: Our Stories Give Light To Our Future. This celebration of the arts showcases a bevy of leading poets and writers on April 5, 2025. We’re talking fiction, nonfiction, poetry galore, and ways to up the ante on your craft.
Download the CityLit Festival: Our Stories Give Light To Our Future flyer.