Salma Khadra Jayyusi is arguably the most important disseminator of Palestinian and Arab literature and culture, and one of the most extraordinary researchers in the field. Poet, critic, and literary historian, she is the Founder and Director of PROTA, founded in 1980, for the translation of the best in Arabic literature into English; and East-West Nexus, founded in 1991, for the dissemination of the knowledge of Arabic culture and civilization outside the Arab world.
Mohammad al-Assad is a Palestinian poet, novelist, literary critic and researcher. He is the author of seventeen collections of poetry, including Singing in Deep Vaults (Baghdad, 1974), and the author of six novels: the best-selling Children of the Dew (1990), translated into French, Portuguese, Greek and Hebrew, and republished in Jerusalem by Dar al-Fil in 2013, The Refugee Text (1999), The Lover's Gardens (2001), The Tree of Pleasures (2004), Sounds of Silence (2009) and Umm al-Zeinat Under the Carob Trees (2009).
Najwan Darwish is one of the foremost Arabic-language poets of his generation. He was born in Jerusalem in 1978, exactly thirty years after his family was exiled from their home in the western part of the city. Since the publication of his first collection in 2000, his poetry has met with acclaim across the Arab world. He has published five books, and his Selected Poems, translated into English by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, was published in 2014 by New York Review Books.
