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Poetry Readings and Conversation with Maya Abu Al-Hayyat & Special Guest Deema Shehabi

“You Can Be the Last Leaf: Selected Poems” by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat directs the Palestine Writing Workshop. She’ll read poems & be in conversation with poet Deema Shehabi

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 11am PT / 2pm ET
Register now! $10 donation, benefit for the Palestine Writing Workshop

Facebook event – RSVP & share!

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat directs the Palestine Writing Workshop, an institution that encourages reading in Palestinian communities through creative writing projects and storytelling with children and teachers.

Maya has published four collections of poems, four novels, and numerous children’s stories, including The Blue Pool of Questions. She contributed to and wrote a foreword for A Bird Is Not a Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Poetry, and she is an editor of The Book of Ramallah. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cordite Poetry Review, The Guardian, and Literary Hub; she lives in Jerusalem and works in Ramallah.

Deema K. Shehabi is the author of Thirteen Departures From the Moon and co-editor with Beau Beausoleil of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here , for which she received the Northern California Book Award’s NCBR Recognition Award. She co-authored Diaspo/Renga with Marilyn Hacker and won the 2018 Nazim Hikmet poetry competition . Her work has also appeared in Literary Imagination, the Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Poetry London, and Crab Orchard, and has been translated into French, Farsi, and Arabic; she has been nominated for the Pushcart prize several times.

PRAISE FOR “You Can Be The Last Leaf”

“The Palestinian poet’s U.S. debut gathers two decades of her intimate testimony about private life in a public war zone, where ‘those who win by killing fewer children / are losers.’”—New York Times

“Al-Hayyat’s latest devastating and courageous collection captures the precarious everyday lives of Palestinians with enormous empathy and glistening clarity . . . The vivid translations by Fady Joudah will jostle readers into discomfort and pin Al-Hayyat’s stunning voice into their ears.”—Booklist

“Abu Al-Hayyat explores the broader political and geographic aspects of Palestinian life under colonial rule while at the same time interweaving the quotidian aspects of life and loss in such settings. Within these frictions of exterior trauma and private contemplations, large constraints and small freedoms, these poems soar.”—Chicago Review of Books

Buy a copy of “You Can Be the Last Leaf” from MECA’s online store!

Tickets $10, Benefit for the Palestine Writing Workshop
Register now! www.mecaforpeace.org/lastleaf
For info: meca@mecaforpeace.org, 510-548-0542

Cosponsored by SacramentoBethlehem Sister City