Nathalie Handal’s recent books include the flash collection The Republics (Pitt Poetry Series), lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers” and winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the Arab American Book Award; the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucia (Pitt Poetry Series) and Love and Strange Horses (Pitt Poetry Series), winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award. She is a professor at Columbia University and writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words Without Borders.
Ibtisam Azem is a writer and journalist, born and raised in al-Taybeh. She studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later at the University of Freiburg, where she completed an M.A. in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies with a minor in German and English literature.
Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer of fiction based in London. Her first novel, Out of It, was published by Bloomsbury UK and Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Press (BQFP) in 2011. The US edition was published by Bloomsbury in 2012.
Filmmaker Kamal Aljafari talks to Nathalie Handal about the poetry of memory, and displacement in Palestine.
Ibtisam Azem is a writer and journalist, born and raised in Tayibe, in the area known as the Triangle, north of Jaffa. She studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later at the University of Freiburg, where she completed an MA in Islamic studies and German, and English literature.
Sousan Hammad has lived in the United States, Palestine and France. Her essays and poetry translations have appeared in numerous magazines including Guernica, Electronic Intifadah and al-Araby al-Jadeed. She is a contributing writer to Al Jazeera America.
Liana Badr is the author one novella, three collected short stories, six children’s books, a book of interviews, a book of poetry, and four novels: A Compass for the Sunflower, A Balcony over the Fakehani, and The Eye of the Mirror. She has a directed various films, including The Green Bird, Fadwa—A Tale of a Palestinian Poetess, and Zetounat. Badr also wrote the script and scenario for Rana's Wedding, a film by Palestinian director Hany Abu Assad that opened the Critics’ Week at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.
Born in Beirut in 1982, Ismail Khalidi is a Palestinian-American writer. His plays include Tennis in Nablus (Alliance Theater), Foot, Truth Serum Blues (Pangea World Theater), Final Status, Sabra Falling, and the co-adaptation of Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Returning to Haifa for the stage. Khalidi has been a Many Voices Fellow at the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis, as well as an Emerging Writers Fellow at the New York Theater Workshop.
Raja Shehadeh is a writer and lawyer. His books include Strangers in the House (2002); When the Bulbul Stopped Singing: Life in Ramallah Under Siege (2003); Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2007), for which he won the 2008 Orwell Prize for Political Writing; and A Rift in Time, Travels with my Ottoman Uncle (2010). Shehadeh is a founder of the pioneering human rights organization Al Haq, an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists. His most recent book is Language of Peace, Language of War: Palestine, Israel and the Search for Justice.
