Event guidelines:

• Doors will open at 6PM, and the reading will begin at 7PM.
• All attendees are required to wear a face mask at all times.
• Additional copies of the authors’ books will be available for purchase at the event.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we’ll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact eventhelp@booksaremagic.net.

100% of all ticket sales and 20% of all event book sales will be donated to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.

This event is presented in collaboration with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. The Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) is devoted to creating, publishing, developing and disseminating creative writing by Asian Americans, and to providing an alternative literary arts space at the intersection of migration, race, and social justice. Since their founding in 1991, they have been dedicated to the belief that Asian American stories deserve to be told. At a time when migrants, women, people of color, Muslims, and LGBTQ people are specifically targeted, we offer a new countercultural public space in which to imagine a more just future. For more information about the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, visit their website at aaww.org.

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.

Ken Chen is an Assistant Professor and the Associate Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College. His poetry collection Juvenilia was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award by Louise Glück, who wrote “Like only the best poets, Ken Chen makes with his voice a new category.” His forthcoming book, tentatively titled Death Star, follows his journey to the underworld to rescue his father and his encounters there with those destroyed by colonialism. Chen has received fellowships from the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. His nonfiction work has been published in Best American Essays, N+1, The New Republic, Frieze, The New Inquiry, Poetry, and NPR’s All Things Considered. Chen served as the Executive Director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop from 2008 to 2019. He also co-founded the cultural website Arts & Letters Daily and CultureStrike, a national arts organization dedicated to migrant justice.

Temim Fruchter is a queer nonbinary anti-Zionist Jewish writer who lives in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland, and is the recipient of fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Vermont Studio Center, and a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. She is co-host of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn. Her debut novel, City of Laughter, is out now on Grove Atlantic.

Aya Ghanameh is a Palestinian illustrator, writer, and designer from Amman, Jordan. Her work moves away from state-centric ways of thinking to center the voices of ordinary people in historical and political narratives. Her debut picture book, These Olive Trees, is inspired by the experiences of her family who cultivated her love of the land throughout her upbringing in exile. Having graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, she is currently based in New York City where she overspends on food from Arab restaurants.

Hannah Moushabeck is a second-generation Palestinian American author, editor, and marketer who was raised in a family of booksellers and publishers in Western Massachusetts and England. Born in Brooklyn into Interlink Publishing, a family-run independent publishing house, she learned the power of literature at a young age. Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine is her first picture book. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts on the homelands of the Pocumtuc and Nipmuc Nations.

Emma Seligman is a Canadian director of the films Shiva Baby and Bottoms.