Mizna+RAWIFest 2023

With a keynote address from Hala Alyan, join us for a weekend of poetry, dance, and art celebrating SWANA artists and beyond!

RAWI Craft Talk 1: An Exploration of Kinships with the Olive Tree

RAWI is holding a craft series! The first of our talks comes from Layla Feghali of River Rose Re-Membrance and the SWANA ancestral project.

Established in 1993, RAWI is a national organization that provides mentoring, community, and support for Arab American writers and those with roots in the Arabic speaking world and diaspora. We are a non-profit 501(c)(3) literary organization dedicated to supporting and disseminating creative writing and scholarly writing by Arab/SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) Americans and those from the Arabic speaking world–which often means creating space and highlighting voices and people threatened by erasure. We put on readings, panels, workshops, roundtables, conferences, and festivals that emphasize inclusivity.

A collage of book covers from the included titles

I had so much fun compiling a list of anticipated SWANA releases for RAWI 

, and several of the books I wrote about for that list turned out to be among my absolute favorite reads of recent years — Munir Hachemi’s 

 were particular standouts. This year, there is once again a rich collection of new releases by SWANA authors that I can’t wait to spend some time with in 2025.

There are many firsts in this list — debuts, first forays into new genres, first works in English, etc. — as well as many familiar voices. I’m also excited to see how many of these books offer really new and innovative sorts of stories, reflections, and poetics. As SWANA literature in English expands every year, it is always wonderful to see it move in new directions and push the limits of the types of stories we can tell (and have published) further and further.

This piece covers 31 particularly exciting releases from January-June of 2025, broken down into fiction (including YA), non-fiction, and poetry. I hope to be back in July to cover more new releases for the latter half of the year! As always, both the books selected for this preview and the consideration of what falls under “SWANA literature” are meant to be expansive and inclusive but not comprehensive.




 and I’m a huge supporter of poets writing novels generally, so 

 has been on my radar for a while. I’m excited to finally get a chance to read it and have seen a lot of early praise so far! A messy coming-of-age story of an Afghan girl growing up in Berlin, this story seems both familiar and wholly original.



Another debut novel by a writer who works in multiple genres — this time a playwright! If you enjoyed Isabella Hammad’s recent novel 

, the plot of this book, where a diaspora Palestinian helps put on a Shakespeare play in the West Bank, might seem a little familiar. But this book has a lot else going on, including arranged romance, family sagas, and relationships between mothers and daughters. It looks like a fun read!



This may be my personal most anticipated book of the year. A story of grief, political history, feminism, family secrets — this book seems to have everything I usually look for in a novel. Rakha has written many novels originally in Arabic, but I believe this is his first English language novel, and I look forward to digging into its pages.



I am cautiously intrigued by this novel, which offers a humorous take on a project of ISIS bride deradicalization from an author who worked on similar projects as an academic before leaving her former career. Since my own academic work focuses on critical terrorism studies and critiques radicalization and deradicalization theories and tactics from a gender studies perspective, I perhaps have a particular investment in this topic! But this is certainly a new sort of story, and I’m interested in what it has to say.



Amal El-Mohtar co-authored the hugely popular speculative queer romance-adjacent novel 

, but this is her solo debut and it looks excellent. Like 

, it’s a speculative novel, but leans more into fantasy/fairytale than sci-fi, and tells an enchanted and mysterious tale of sisterhood.



Laila Lalami has written across many genres including historical fiction, mystery, and non-fiction, but I believe this is her first outwardly speculative/SFF book. Despite the speculative landscape of a near-future where the main character is detained based on analysis of her dreams, Lalami’s narrative remains a deeply familiar one, tackling pervasive technology, surveillance, and state control.



A family saga centered on the chaotic, brilliant, beautiful lives of women is a classic format of the SWANA-American literature genre (if such a thing exists), but each take on it is different, funny, lovely and all of them feel sort of like being at home. 

 looks like a great debut novel and an excellent addition to the SWANA women family saga canon.



As an LA-based SWANA current PhD student, I may be a bit biased when I say this, but this novel about an LA-based SWANA recent PhD grad embarking on a project to marry rich looks SO fun. I can’t wait to read this one! If it’s as good as it seems, I already know what I’m getting all my PhD friends for Christmas next year…



Like many of this year’s novels, this book feels like a totally new and a little bit out-there kind of story in the best way. Characters whose cult-like love of Kafka leads them to join a resistance movement and attempt an assassination? What more could you ask for! Though Sönmez has written many books in Turkish, this is his first Kurdish language novel, perhaps a salient addition to its political themes.



Another exciting new family saga, this novel about an Armenian family from Beirut centered around the Lebanese Civil War has at least a superficially similar premise to one of my favorite novels of the last few years, 

 by Hala Alyan. There’s few things I like more in a book than a funny, sad, complicated story of multiple generations grappling with war, displacement, and personal struggles, so I’m really looking forward to reading this one.



This is the third installment of Huda Fahmy’s YA graphic novel series and it grapples with a high school-aged main character dealing with her parents’ divorce. It’ll always be amazing and brilliant and cool to me that books like this exist (even more so when they’re graphic novels!) for SWANA young people in ways that felt so out of reach when I was that age not all that long ago!



The second book in Chelsea Abdullah’s fantasy series, 

, is finally coming out this year and continues the story of Loulie, a merchant in a world where jinn are hunted, who gets sucked into complex power struggles. This second book finds Loulie trapped in the realm of jinn and promises chaos, magic, and intrigue. As always, I’m happy to see more SWANA authors producing “Arabian fantasy” works that are grounded in actual histories and cultural mythologies when so much of the genre’s popularity has happened without SWANA authors at the helm.



Jackie Khalilieh’s second YA romance novel looks really charming and fun and exceedingly relatable. Who amongst us hasn’t been a type-A Arab girl with anxiety and chaotic insecurity about dating? One day, hopefully soon, we will get an Arab girl To 

-style teen romcom film adaptation and I think Jackie Khalilieh’s work might just be what gets us there.



 by Yigit Karaahmet, trans. Nicholas Glastonbury 

I’m not usually a big reader of thrillers, but this book, which combines messy love triangle drama with crime, might just be the exception. I’m totally intrigued by the plot and like many of the novels coming out this year, this story feels genuinely fresh and new to the landscape of SWANA lit. Extra exciting that it’s in translation! This one is definitely on my list.



Yet another really innovative story, this book follows a young Somali woman living in London who is transported into an alternate reality where she witnesses the life she would have lived had her parents never left Somalia. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen themes of diaspora, displacement, alternate forms of belonging tackled in such a direct and speculative way, and I find the approach really refreshing!




Hot Date!: Sweet & Savory Recipes Celebrating the Date, from Party Food to Everyday Feasts

I am on record saying that no SWANA books list would be complete without a cookbook, and this year that role is fittingly filled by a date-based cookbook. This book also promises snippets of historical context about the history and use of dates from SWANA to Palm Springs, which is particularly intriguing to me because I 

 about this very history a couple years ago. I also admitted in that poem that I’m not a big dates fan, but I do love a good dates-based dessert, so I’ll have to give this one a try.



Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal

Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims builds on work he’s been producing for years, and particularly over the last year, which explores the limits of how Palestinians and the Palestinian struggle are perceived and made legible. El-Kurd writes in the tradition of Edward Said’s formative work “Permission to Narrate,” expanding an essential critique for our time.



One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Omar El Akkad’s non-fiction debut, prompted by bearing witness to the genocide in Gaza as well as El Akkad’s long career as a journalist, attends to the profound alienation many of us are too familiar with by now, of existing in a country which would seek to kill you if you were on the other side of a border, and will probably still seek to kill you slowly on this side of it. It asks if and how we might seek possibility in a desperate time.



I know Roza Nozari’s beautiful art from instagram but am not yet familiar with her writing. This memoir looks really exciting! I’m especially enamored with the concept of a memoir that is also about someone else, Nozari’s mother, and how she seeks to weave her own history and her mother’s history together to explore belonging, queerness, exile, love, and the stories we tell about all of it.



How precious and lucky that we still get to experience new Etel Adnan book releases after her passing. Published in what would have been her 100th year, this book combines three essays of Adnan’s written between 1984 and 1995 and reflecting on her life in and beyond Beirut. I know that her words will resonate with our current realities and keep her present with us in times of disaster.



The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders

I’m really excited for Sarah Aziza’s debut book — her essays and published letters to George Abraham since the start of the genocide have been both such a balm and an unsettling. Her writing on Palestine always challenges me and gives me new ways of thinking and being in community. I expect her memoir, on personal and familial traumas, eating disorders, and the echoes of history in the body, will continue to do just that.



Forgotten: Searching for Palestine’s Hidden Places and Lost Memorials

, this book, co-written with his wife Penny Johnson, promises to be a brilliant reflection on Palestinian history and existence that is deeply grounded in place and in the landscape of Palestine. Amidst so many powerful books on Palestine coming out recently, I haven’t seen a ton of talk about this one yet, but I hope it’s on everyone’s radar!



Hala Alyan is one of my very favorite writers of both poetry and fiction, so I’m thrilled to see her make her non-fiction debut. If her often very personal poetry is any indication, her memoir promises to be a stunning, devastating, sharp book with absolutely magical prose. There’s something very special about seeing an author tackle similar themes across three genres, feeling the familiar contours of narrative laid over distinct forms.




What I love about Farid Matuk’s poetry is how he writes with such precision and attention to language, sound, and the narrow space of the line. This is especially true in 

 from which this new collection draws its title, so I really look forward to seeing where he takes these sounds and feelings.



 by Nasser Rabah, trans. Emna Zghal, Khalid Al-Hilli, Ammiel Alcalay

Translated poetry so rarely gets the attention it deserves, so I hope everyone will check out this bilingual edition of Nasser Rabah’s poetry, the first full translation of Rabah’s work into English. This book combines previously published works from his Arabic collections with new poems written since October 2023, chronicling the unfolding genocide. You can get a taste of some of Rabah’s poetry 

This year’s poetry releases include a ton of debuts or first US publications from SWANA poets and janan alexandra’s come from is one such debut I’m personally really excited for. alexandra’s poetry is really playful with language and often moves fluidly between English and Arabic to destabilize both, such as in 

. I can’t wait to have the space of a full-length collection to dig into her work!



Mandy Shunnarah’s debut poetry collection is coming out with Diode this spring and looks to be another treat in Palestinian poetry this year. I love how 

 plays with form, drawing on the structure of the play to build a poetic scene, and I look forward to seeing where the rest of the book carries these themes and this style.



Dark Star Requiem in the Key of Nova by Hind Shoufani

US-based readers may be more familiar with Hind Shoufani’s work in film — she co-wrote the wonderful 2020 Palestinian short film 

 — but she is also a poet with several previous works published in Beirut! This will be her first collection published in the US, and its poems cross time and geographies as an ode to place, exhaustion, grief. I love how her long, winding, irreverent poems 

 suck you in and I can’t wait to see more of this in her collection.



This anthology has been a long time in the making and I know that when I finally get to read it, it will fill me with every human emotion. George Abraham and Noor Hindi are brilliant editors who have thoughtfully collected poems from numerous Palestinian writers, known and unknown, living and martyred. Can’t wait to hold this beautiful collection in my hands.



Shameless self-promo moment — my own chapbook is coming out this year! It’s about and after the X-Files, if you’re into that sort of thing, but also if you aren’t. The brilliant Jane Wong says of the chap: “From the X-Files to familial inheritance to questioning the self/selves to the terror of the surveillance state, each poem acts as a kind of ghostly guide through what makes us both alien and human.” For a preview, 

Fargo Tbakhi is one of our greatest living poets without a full-length collection, but that tragedy will soon be made right with the release of 

 this June. Tbakhi writes with an unmatched political precision and poetic inventiveness, pushing form and language to their limits. There are many poems I could point to that support this claim - 

 I so look forward to digging into this collection, which I know will challenge me and sit close to the heart.


 (she/her) is calling on you to join the struggle for the liberation of Palestine and all oppressed peoples globally, from wherever you are, in whatever material way you can. To learn from Palestinian resistance the everyday practice of refusal. She is writing from somewhere in Los Angeles, where she is a PhD student in American Studies & Ethnicity. Her poems appear in Apogee, AAWW, Mizna, and elsewhere, and her debut chapbook is forthcoming with Game Over Books in 2025. Find her on twitter @sa_miathrmoplis.

In the first half of 2025, new SWANA releases give us fresh types of stories and approaches! 

31 New SWANA Books in 2025: January-June Releases

In text: "Books That Shaped SWANA LIT with R. Benedito Ferrao." In images: a tight headshot of Goan scholar and author  R. Beneditor Ferrao and the book cover featuring a moon and hands with henna tattoos. 

 nears its end, an unexpected death occurs. The elderly character in question was taking a bus ride in Detroit when he breathed his last. This person would go routinely to the airport to see passengers arrive on the flight from Lebanon, his homeland. As I read about the character’s death, I was on a bus myself. I put the book down in my lap and realized that I had been crying. The person, an immigrant, had died alone while trying to catch a glimpse of new arrivals from the old country. I thought of my own father.


Like Fatima Abdullah, the tale’s octogenarian protagonist, I was in Los Angeles as I finished reading the book. Fatima decamps to the west coast from Michigan after divorcing her second husband, Ibrahim. She hopes this act will spare him from having to live out their last years together in what she believes to be a marriage he agreed to only out of a sense of obligation upon the death of Marwan, her first husband and Ibrahim’s friend. Fatima takes up residence in the home of her grandson Amir, whose queerness she initially refuses to acknowledge, leading to many comedic moments. 


Like Fatima, in a place famed for its car culture, I took the bus everywhere in the City of Angels and happened to be on one of the routes the book mentions as I read about the death of the old Lebanese character. The bus route referenced passes a 7-Eleven on Wilshire Boulevard, a place my dad 

. That was in 1969, before the political instability, before the refugee crisis, before a long list of events…


 in 2009, the year of its publication, little did I know that the book would become one I would use in my classes so consistently. The text has been a staple on the syllabus of my course titled Outside In: Transnational Asian American Literature. The premise of the course is this: moving away from the idea of Asian Americans as those solely of immigrant heritage, the class asks students to think about what it might mean to consider such literary subjects as being the product of displacement within and beyond the United States. Concurrently, the course also asks students to dwell upon the involvement of America beyond its own borders.


The class requires that every text we read involves the crossing of a nation-state’s boundary, often of a character who is identifiably Asian or Asian American. Thus, when not viewed as being only immigrant (or descended from immigrants), how might we see the construction of Arab and other Asian (American) characters as also being influenced by transnational histories and events? In other words, what happens when one looks beyond the purview of a single nation or the state to understand identity?

Certainly, the most transnational figure in 

 fame. But where she is the teller of stories in the original text, here, in her appearance in this non-Arab setting, she is the receiver of tales about Fatima’s family. The exchanges between the two women are the framing device for the novel, within which is ensconced several other stories. In this way, Yunis’ novel not only makes 

 an intertext, but also echoes the earlier book’s form of intertwined stories in this 21st century version. In so doing, 

 brings the Asian literary form of a framing narrative with other stories within it to an American setting. Before Disney and before orientalist adaptations of Scheherazade’s tales, the legends themselves originated 

, including Iran and the Arab world, as well as South and East Asia.


An early-twentieth-century immigrant to the United States along with Marwan, Fatima’s time in the new country parallels the durée of her fellow-Lebanese and other Arab communities in America, an immigrant history that is 

. In her mid-80s at the time at which she tells her stories to Scheherazade, Fatima recounts for this legendary figure how she, Marwan, and Ibrahim endeavored to acculturate in an unfamiliar land with an unfamiliar language. After all, Fatima had only known a rural life in a small Lebanese village prior to America. Entwined in her stories are legacies of labor struggles, racism and Islamophobia, and intergenerational conflict.


The stories Fatima relays to Scheherazade include accounts of how Marwan and Ibrahim both worked in the burgeoning industries that marked the rise of capitalism in America, chief among them the 

. Fatima recounts the injuries immigrant men faced in unregulated factories, leading to the 

struggle for unionization and labor rights-protections

 that Marwan and Ibrahim find themselves involved with, too.


Because of the many children Fatima had between her two marriages, the novel is a multigenerational family saga, one that is replete with the expected conflict between immigrant parents and their American-born progeny. However, Yunis weaves into these parent-child tussles a bit of the history of the settings in which these events unfold. One such poignant moment ensues during a family road trip which Ibrahim only agrees to after being nagged by his most malcontent child, Randa, who wants the Abdullahs to do things like other Americans.


Stopping at a restaurant in Georgia on their trip, the Abdullahs are faced with the choice of entering one of two bathrooms – one for whites and the other for “coloreds.” At the restaurant, a white man unable to identify Randa ethnically calls her the prettiest mulatto he has ever seen. The cringe-worthy moment makes Ibrahim vow that the family will never vacation again.


As with the previously mentioned history of labor rights-organizing that impinges upon the lives of the first generation in the novel, the history of segregation and anti-Black racism reveals itself in the existence of the second-generation characters. Subtly, the novel portrays the history of the Abdullahs – internal conflicts and all – as one that cannot be separated from American histories of marginalization, institutionalized as they are by society, capitalism, and the state. Nevertheless, the most overt encounter the family have with such state power is in the discovery that they are being racially and religiously profiled in the contemporary moment of the novel’s setting, a subject I will return to soon.


Although Lebanon seems to recede into the backdrop of the family’s history in the novel as the Abdullah’s children and then their children’s children are born in America, readers are constantly reminded of the home country. Apart from the old character who dies on the bus en route to see the planes arrive from Lebanon, it is Fatima herself who is always thinking of Lebanon. Because of Scheherazade’s visitations, Fatima believes she only has 1001 nights remaining on Earth and thus becomes obsessed with figuring out to which of her descendants she will bequeath her village house upon her death.

While Fatima never returns to the homeland, the most unlikely of characters does. It is Fatima’s white-passing granddaughter Dina Bitar, the Texas-born, part-Palestinian child of Randa’s (who belatedly goes by “Randy” to also appear white). On a foolhardy mission to impress an Arab American college activist she becomes infatuated with, Dina joins the fuckboy at a refugee camp in Lebanon where for the first time she encounters a community of other diasporic Palestinians like (and definitely unlike) herself.


In this, the most evidently transnational moment in the novel, one that my students find elucidative of the course’s themes, the All-American Dina (a cheerleader, no less) comes face-to-face with the effects of state-sponsored violence on people with whom she shares an origin. One of the refugees, a seamstress named Sarah, produces a document to show Dina – it is the deed to the woman’s house in Palestine. Just before an Israeli airstrike occurs and Dina and the others have to evacuate the camp, the Palestinian woman confides that she lives with the hope that, one day, she will return to her own country. This year, after (unbelievably) the one-year anniversary of the genocide of Gazans that began on October 7, 2023, teaching this novel has had profound resonance. It has revealed to my students that persecution against Palestinians is not a recent phenomenon; rather, it continues to divest many of their homeland as the world looks on.


Indeed, the question of where one’s home is is a persistent theme in 

. This is a query the Abdullahs find themselves faced with when it becomes clear that they are being targeted by their own government because they are Arab Muslims in post-9/11 America. This, after four generations of the family have been in the United States, with a fifth-generation-child soon to arrive. State surveillance is the unknown soundtrack to the family’s lives as the crackle of static interferes with telephonic conversations. In fact, this is why their relative – the old person on the bus – dies alone and away from the family. The character’s repeated attempts to reach the family are thwarted by phone taps authorized by the government. It is state-sanctioned Islamophobia and racism that gets in the way of this character being with his kin in his final moments.


 brings together themes of state persecution, familial conflict, transnationalism, and Arab American history, but it also has a strong feminist perspective. Fatima’s house in Lebanon – the one she never sees again – was a gift to her from her mother, one that would allow Fatima to have a place to return to should things go awry in America. This matrilineal offering is in keeping with Scheherazade’s own legacy. As we may recall, the storyteller offered herself up in place of her sister, Dunyazad, who was to marry King Shahryar. The reason Scheherazade wished to replace Dunyazad was because the marriage meant certain death, the king finding little reason to prolong his unions were he to be displeased in the least with his brides. It is Scheherazade’s enchanting storytelling (the basis of 

) that causes Shahryar to fall in love with her, thereby keeping her and other women from being murdered.


While I tell my students that this is proof enough of the power of literature to save lives, the other lesson one learns is that Scheherazade grapples with state power, as represented by the king, through the use of culture (and wins). Arguably, Scheherazade’s story ends with the preservation of heteropatriarchy and not with the demise of the king (or the state). Yet, in demonstrating that stories and their telling preserve heritage while state-sanctioned violence looms, both 

 and its ancient inspiration ask us to consider how even those made marginal hold on to what is most important to them and preserve it by passing it on in the stories they tell for more than a thousand and one nights. 


 was born in Kuwait and has lived and worked in Asia, Europe, N. America, and Oceania. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies at William & Mary and winner of the Jinlan Liu APIA Faculty Research Award. Ferrão’s academic writing appears in 

Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication

 among others. His fiction and creative nonfiction can be read in 

. He is also a regular contributor to the journalistic platform 

"This year, after (unbelievably) the one-year anniversary of the genocide of Gazans that began on October 7, 2023, teaching this novel has had profound resonance." 

Mentorship

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