Event
Sumūd: A New Palestinian Reader
3620 Walnut St, Philadelphia, PA
Join us for an evening celebrating Sumūd: A New Palestinian Reader, an anthology that illuminates the resilience and cultural strength of the Palestinian people in the face of ongoing adversity. Featuring contributions from poets, writers, historians, and artists—alongside twenty-five striking black-and-white illustrations—this collection reflects the unwavering spirit of steadfastness, or sumūd, a deeply ingrained Palestinian value. From poignant memoirs and short stories to insightful essays and stirring poetry, this event will honor the profound role of culture in resistance. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear a discussion between Dr. Huda Fakhreddine and the editors Malu Halasa and Jordan Elgrably as they discuss the power of art, literature, and narrative in preserving identity, as well as a powerful reading from Palestinian poet Ahmad Almallah.
Featured Speakers
Huda Fakhreddine's work focuses on modernist movements or trends in Arabic poetry and their relationship to the Arabic literary tradition. She is interested in the role of the Arabic qaṣīda as a space for negotiating the foreign and the indigenous, the modern and the traditional, and its relationship to other poetic forms such as the free verse poem and the prose poem. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and the co-translator of Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA editions, 2017) and The Sky That Denied Me (University of Texas Press, 2020). Her translations of modern Arabic poems have appeared in Banipal, World Literature Today, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly and Middle Eastern Literatures.
Malu Halasa, Literary Editor at The Markaz Review, is a London-based writer and editor. Her latest book as editor is Woman Life Freedom: Voices and Art From the Women’s Protests in Iran (Saqi 2023). Her six previous co-edited anthologies include Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline, with coedited with Zaher Omareen & Nawara Mahfoud; The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie: Intimacy and Design, with Rana Salam; and the short series: Transit Beirut: New Writing and Images, with Rosanne Khalaf, and Transit Tehran: Young Iran and Its Inspirations, with Maziar Bahari. She was managing editor of the Prince Claus Fund Library; a founding editor of Tank Magazine and Editor at Large for Portal 9. As a freelance journalist in London, she has covered wide-ranging subjects, from water as occupation in Israel/Palestine to Syrian comics during the present-day conflict. Her books, exhibitions and lectures chart a changing Middle East. Malu Halasa’s debut novel, Mother of All Pigs was reviewed by the New York Times as “a microcosmic portrait of … a patriarchal order in slow-motion decline.”
Jordan Elgrably is the Editor in Chief of The Markaz Review. For many years he worked in Los Angeles where he was a social entrepreneur, producer & the founding director of the former Levantine Cultural Center (est. 2001), renamed The Markaz, Arts Center for the Greater Middle East. The Markaz closed on May 31, 2020 (as reported in the Los Angeles Times) but returned in September 2020 as The Markaz Review.