Palestinian Poems with and for the Now
This list is a beginning. Please borrow and/or expand it. You can find more poems at this Word doc. There is also this beautiful PDF, which includes additional resources.
Rasha Abdulhadi
Incomplete List of Unauthorized Palestinians
a litany of refusals to become ghostly
Rasha Abdulhadi is calling on you, dear reader, to join them in refusing and resisting the genocide of the Palestinian people. Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now. If it’s a handful, throw it. If it’s a fingernail full, scrape it out and throw. Get in the way however you can. The elimination of the Palestinian people is not inevitable. We can refuse with our every breath and action. We must. @rashaabdulhadi
leena aboutaleb
leena aboutaleb is an Egyptian and Palestinian writer. She is asking you to commit to material and tangible solidarity with the liberation of Palestine, from every fracture and ability you possess. Make the monsters untenable for a new world to finally kiss the sun and our children in liberation. She’ll see you in the next world over, fresh bread on the kitchen table.
Basman Aldirawi
This Bread Was Born, This Bread Was Killed
Basman Aldirawi (also published as Basman Derawi) is a physiotherapist and a graduate of Al-Azhar University in Gaza in 2010. Inspired by an interest in music, movies, and people with special needs, he contributes dozens of stories to the online platform We Are Not Numbers.
Ahmad Almallah
A Poem for Gaza, a Poem for Palestine
More from Almallah’s Border Wisdom
Ahmad Almallah is a poet from Palestine. His first book of poems Bitter English is now available in the Phoenix Poets Series from the University of Chicago Press. His new book Border Wisdom is now available from Winter Editions.
Hala Alyan
Hala Alyan is the author of the novels Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and The Arsonists’ City, a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, as well as four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year.
Samer Abu Hawash
It No Longer Matters If Anyone Loves Us, translated by Huda Fakhreddine
Samer Abu Hawash (@samerabuhawash) is a Palestinian writer and translator.
Huda Fakhreddine is Associate Professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a writer, a translator, and the author of several scholarly books.
Hiba Abu Nada
I Grant You Refuge, translated by Huda Fakhreddine
Hiba Abu Nada was a novelist, poet, and educator. Her novel Oxygen is Not for the Dead won the Sharjah Award for Arab Creativity in 2017. She wrote this poem on Oct. 10th, 2023. She died a martyr, killed in her home in south Gaza by an Israeli raid on Oct. 20th, 2023. She was 32 years old.
Huda Fakhreddine is Associate Professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a writer, a translator, and the author of several scholarly books.
Mosab Abu Toha
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet from Gaza. His début poetry book, “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear,” was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won an American Book Award.
Refaat al-Areer
Untitled (“If I must die”)
Refaat al-Areer is a writer and translator who can be found at @itranslate123.
Ahlam Bsharat
I Saw, Father, What You Saw, translated by Nora Parr
Ahlam Bsharat is a Palestinian novelist, poet, and children’s author, as well as a teacher of creative writing.
Nora Parr is a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham and at the Center for Lebanese Studies and is the author of Novel Palestine: Nation through the Works of Ibrahim Nasrallah. She coedits Middle Eastern Literatures.
Olivia Elias
Day 38, Nov. 14, I Didn’t See the Fall This Year, Translated by Jérémy Victor Robert
A poet of the Palestinian diaspora, Olivia Elias writes in French. Born in Haifa in 1944, she lived until the age of sixteen in Lebanon, where her family took refuge in 1948, then in Montreal, before moving to France. Her work, translated into English, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese, has appeared in anthologies and numerous journals. In 2022, she published her first book in English translation, Chaos, Crossing (World Poetry), translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid.
Jérémy Victor Robert is a translator between English and French who works and lives in his native Réunion Island.
Fady Joudah
A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation
Fady Joudah is the author of five collections of poems, most recently, Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize.
Maya Murry
Maya Murry is a Palestinian-American student at Cornell University.
Mandy Shunnarah
they stop torching our cities long enough to pray
Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is an Alabama-born, Palestinian-American writer of essays, poetry, short stories, and journalism who now calls Columbus, Ohio, home. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland, is forthcoming from Belt Publishing.
Ghassan Zaqtan
Everything You Know Will Rise, translated by Samuel Wilder
Ghassan Zaqtan is a Palestinian poet, novelist and editor and has authored numerous collections of poetry, novels, and a play. His verse collection Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, translated by Fady Joudah, was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize for 2013, and he was nominated for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in both 2014 and 2016.
Samuel Wilder is a translator of Arabic literature, a writer, and a student of comparative poetics. He has translated three books by Zaqtan. The latest, An Old Carriage with Curtains, is forthcoming from Seagull next month.
Also read:
Good Morning Gaza, by Fady Joudah, with poetry by Mahmoud Darwish (tr. Joudah)
At the Threshold of Humanity, Karim Kattan
The Annotated Nightstand: What Ahmad Almallah is Reading Now and Next, on LitHub
In Spanish: