The Latest

Part of our focus, this Women in Translation Month (#WiTMonth), is on classic Arabic works by women, especially those at the margins of (or neglected entirely by) critical and readerly attention.

‘I Was Here Yesterday; is set between Saudi Arabia and the Florida coast and entangles grief and memory, centering on how the narrator grapples with her mother’s death and the truths about her mother’s life—and her own—that she uncovers.

Haseeb Al-Zainy’s “The Blacklist” appears in the new anthology The Book of Damascus: A City in Short Fiction, out this month from Comma Press. 

These poems, translated by Phoebe Carter, are from Rasha Omran’s sixth collection, “A Secret Wife of Absence.”

This poem is from a forthcoming collection,  مصمم معارك, to be published by the General Egyptian Book Organization.

In memory of the July 2025 massacres in Sweida, Syria.

Editors of the anthology Palestine is Everywhere — Skye Arundhati Thomas, Edwin Nasr, and Gloria Habsburg — recently launched a new “Palestine is Everywhere” platform to host a series of monthly commissions, “creating an ongoing space to support and amplify the work of artists, writers, and practitioners from Palestine and the wider region.”

“Some classical poets feel that the popularity of colloquial writers has nothing to do with the quality of their work, but rather because they have chosen the easier path.”

Here, Leri Price talks about the referred trauma (and guilt) of translating testimonies from a genocide, how she worked with translators bringing the book into other languages, and the particular challenges of translating this book.

Your love has taught me… how to be sad.
And I have needed, for ages
A woman to make me sad
A woman in whose arms I could weep
Like a sparrow,

“In Ways of the Lord, Christians are mistaken for being Jews and are accused of spying for Israel, which demonstrates the lack of recognition of Copts and their conflation with other minorities.”