MAY 12 | 6:30pm at McNally Jackson Seaport
Palestine Is Not a Metaphor
Hala Alyan & Sarah Aziza
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What does it mean to write the story of a self amidst a collective legacy of loss? Palestinian writers Hala Alyan and Sarah Aziza discuss their debut memoirs, and confront the possibilities and limitations of narrative in the context of historical erasure, and ongoing genocide, in Palestine.
Hala Alyan is the author of the novels Salt Houses—winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize—and The Arsonists’ City, a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year and The Moon That Turns You Back. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, the New York Times, The Guardian, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.
Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer, translator, and artist with roots in ‘Ibdis and Deir al-Balah, Gaza. She is the author of The Hollow Half, a genre-bending memoir of Palestinian diaspora and return. She is the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship and numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, and has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, South Africa, the West Bank, and the United States. Her award-winning journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Nation, among other publications.