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.
Mohammed Abu Lebda
Mohammed Abu Lebda is a Palestinian poet and translator from Gaza.
Heba Al-Agha
Heba Al-Agha is a mother, amateur writer, and creative writing educator at the A.M. Qattan Foundation in Gaza City. She does not belong to any writers’ unions and has not published any literary books, but works with an army of young writers training them in freedom and the power of writing. She writes at t.me/hebalaghatalkwar andhttps://gazastory.com/archives/author/hebaaga.
Julia Choucair Vizoso is an independent scholar and seasonal translator. She hopes Heba Al-Agha’s words move you to refuse and resist the Israel-US genocide of the Palestinian people and destruction of Lebanon, wherever and however you can.
Basman Aldirawi
This Bread Was Born, This Bread Was Killed
You Don’t Need Your Glasses, Santa, tr. Tala Ladki
The Idea Has Failed, tr. Elete N-F & Sarah Lasoye
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.
Tala Ladki is from Beirut, Lebanon. After graduating with a BA in Media and Communications, she worked in marketing for several years before deciding to switch gears. She’s currently pursuing her MA in Creative Writing in hopes of starting a career in writing and publishing.
Farah Alhaddad
Farah Alhaddad is a lawyer and writer based in Amman, Jordan. In a letter to her future self, she once asked, “Wherever I am and whatever I’m doing, am I operating on the amorphous and vague ideals that I want to desperately apply but haven’t actually? I’m talking about preventing, or in the least not participating in the exploitation of others, striving for (economic) justice, working towards a post-colonial, de-colonial, anti-colonial or whatever have you future and existence?” She still doesn’t have a confident answer.
Ahmad Almallah
Holy Land, Wasted. A poem with Huda Fakhreddine
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.
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.
Hala Alyan
The Interviewer Wants to Know About Fashion
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
My People, 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
Pull Yourself Together, translated by Huda Fakhreddine
Seven Skies for the Homeland, translated by Huda Fakhreddine
Our Loneliness, translated by Salma Harland
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.
Salma Harland is a British-Egyptian literary translator who works between Arabic and English. She was a 2022 Virtual Travel Fellow with the American Literary Translators Association; a recipient of one of the Dutch Foundation for Literature’s 2023 Translation Grants; and a longlistee for the 2022-23 John Dryden Translation Prize. Her translations have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, ArabLit Quarterly, Poetry London, and elsewhere.
Ibrahim Nasrallah
Mary of Gaza, translated by Huda Fakhreddine
Ibrahim Nasrallah was born in 1954 to Palestinian parents who were uprooted from their land in 1948. He spent his childhood and youth in the Alwehdat Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, and began his working life as a teacher in Saudi Arabia. After returning to Amman, he worked as a journalist and a cultural Director. He has been a full-time writer since 2006, publishing 14 poetry collections and 22 novels, including his epic “Palestinian Comedy” series of 12 novels covering 250 years of modern Palestinian history.
Huda Fakhreddine is associate professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a translator of Arabic poetry 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.
Hani Albayarie
Summer Awad
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.
Mikhail de Palraine
Mikhail de Palraine is a pseudonym for the author’s safety.
Olivia Elias
DAY 21, WORDS ARE TOO POOR, translated by Jérémy Victor Robert
Day 38, Nov. 14, I Didn’t See the Fall This Year, translated by Jérémy Victor Robert
DAY 74, THERE WILL ALWAYS BE POETS, translated by Jérémy Victor Robert
Hear Ye, Hear Ye!, translated by Jérémy Victor Robert
Signal, translated by Jérémy Victor Robert
Day 97, Time Has Swallowed Time, January 12, translated by Jérémy Victor Robert
no remission, translated by Jérémy Victor Robert
Poetic Art of Savagery, 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. One year later, Your Name Palestine, translated by Sarah Riggs and Jeremy Victor Robert, appeared from the same publisher. https://eliasolivia.com
Jérémy Victor Robert is a translator between English and French who works and lives in his native Réunion Island.
Samah Serour Fadil
Samah Serour Fadil is an Afro-Palestinian writer, editor, and translator who resides in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal.
Samah Serour Fadil is calling on you, dear reader, to join her in refusing and resisting the genocide of the Palestinian people, the Sudanese people, the Congolese people, the Sahrawi people, the people of Tigray, and all oppressed peoples all over the world. Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now. We can refuse with every breath, with every action. Resist. Resist. Resist.
Summer Farah
PORTRAIT OF ME BAKING AS BREAD IN JERUSALEM
Summer Farah is a Palestinian American writer and editor from California. She is organizes with the Radius of Arab American Writers and sends out the occasional essay at evening conversations. Summer covers the seasonal must-read poetry previews at The Millions.
Liane Al Ghusain
Liane Al Ghusain (b. 1987) is a Palestinian-Kuwaiti artist who lives and works in Dearborn, Michigan. She received her MFA from New York University Abu Dhabi (2023) and completed a co-terminal BA (2009) and MA (2010) in English from Stanford University, with a focus on creative writing and interdisciplinary honors in feminist studies. She also has completed postgraduate studies at the Ashkal Alwan Home Workspace Program in Beirut, Lebanon.
Bassam Jamil
I am the stranger, translated by Nicole Mankinen
Bassam Jamil is a Palestinian writer living in the Galilee refugee camp near Baalbek, Lebanon. He has published two collections of short stories and a novel, and his play “Death Boats” was shortlisted at the Sundance Festival in Morocco (2016).
Nicole Mankinen is a settler with European heritage living in Toronto, Canada. She is a freelance editor and writer and a lifelong advocate for the Palestinian cause.
Fady Joudah
A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation
Then My Friend in Nablus Had a Dream.
[…] (If you can read this)
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.
Lisa Suhair Majaj
Lisa Suhair Majaj, a Palestinian-American, is author of Geographies of Light (2008 Del Sol Press Poetry Prize), poems and essays in many journals and anthologies across the US, Europe, and the Middle East, and two children’s books. She is also a scholar of Arab-American literature and co-editor of three volumes of critical essays on Arab, Arab-American, and other international women of color writers. Her poetry has been translated into several languages, including Arabic, and was included in the 2016 exhibition Aftermath: The Fallout of War—America and the Middle East (Harn Museum of Art). Her grandmother was from Jaffa and her father was from Jerusalem. She lives in Cyprus.
Maya Murry
Maya Murry is a Palestinian-American student at Cornell University.
Nasser Rabah
Dead Cats Continue to Meow, translated by Emna Zghal, Khaled al-Hilli, and Ammiel Alcalay for the Brooklyn Translation Collective
Nasser Rabah was born in Gaza in 1963 and continues to live there. He got his BA in Agricultural Science in 1985, before going on to work as Director of the Communication Department in the Agriculture Ministry. He is a member of the Palestinian Writers and Authors Union and has published five collections of poetry, Running After Dead Gazelles (2003); One of Nobody (2010); Passersby with Invisible Clothes (2013); Water Thirsty for Water (2016); Eulogy for the Robin (2020), and a novel, Since approximately an hour (2018). Some of his poems have been translated into English and French.
Aiya Sakr and Amany El-Regeb
Untitled, translated by Aya Sake
Aiya Sakr (she/they) is a Palestinian-American poet and artist. They are the author of Her Bones Catch the Sun(The Poet’s Haven, 2018). A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared in Palette, Mizna, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is a Winter 2023 Tin House Fellow and the founder of We the Imagined Poetry Workshop for Arab Women Poets. They have served as Poetry Editor for Sycamore Review, and as Poetry Coordinator for Unootha Magazine’s Summer Writing Program. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Purdue University, where she currently teaches. She collects buttons, and is enthusiastic about birds.
Amany El-Regeb, 16, was martyred in Gaza, Oct. 13, 2023.
Edward Salem
Edward Salem is a 2023 Kresge Artist Fellow in Literary Arts and the recipient of the 2022 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize. He was chosen by Ottessa Moshfegh as the winner of BOMB magazine’s 2021 Fiction Contest and was selected by Louise Glück as a finalist for the 2021 Changes Book Prize. His writing has been published in Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, The Columbia Review, Best Debut Short Stories (Catapult), and elsewhere. He is the co-founder and co-director of City of Asylum/Detroit, a nonprofit that provides long-term sanctuary to writers and artists who have been persecuted for their work.
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.
Veera Sulaiman
Veera Sulaiman is a Finnish Palestinian writer, organizer, Tatreez artist and herbalist. Her written work explores the intersections of mixed identity, language, intergenerational memory, animism, art as resistance and propaganda as art. As a descendant of Palestinian refugees she is interested in chronicling how our worlds continue to end and what endures after those calamities.
Alia Yunis
Alia Yunis is a writer and filmmaker and a past PEN Emerging Voice Fellow. Her feature documentary, The Golden Harvest (2019), a 6,000-year-old love story that began in Palestine, is currently playing in festivals and other venues and won Best of the Fest at its US debut at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival. Her debut novel, The Night Counter (Random House), was critically-acclaimed by the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly and several publications. Alia thinks about trees a lot and is currently producing an interactive documentary, Tree-Routed, connecting people’s personal stories around their trees to a shared heritage across the oceans. She is also writing a screenplay about a Muslim girl in small Minnesota town obsessed with Christmas trees. Her fiction and non-fiction writings and film works have have been translated into 10 languages.
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.
Omar Ziyadeh
Nobody Can Identify Their Own Remains, and I Am Unable to Identify My Own, translated by Alice S. Yousef
Omar Ziyadeh is a Palestinian poet born in 1987 in Nablus. He holds a BA degree in English literature and a MA degree in linguistics and translation from An-Najah University in Nablus, Palestine. He has published two books, Kelab Amyaa’ Fe Nozha (Blind Dogs on a Walk), a poetry collection which received the Abdel Mohsin Al-Qattan Foundation Award and Mokhtalaf Feeh (Differential), a literary analysis of ten poems.
Alice S. Yousef is a Palestinian translator, blogger, researcher and poet, who has published short stories, poetry and translations. Her work can be found on various online journals, including Fikra Magazine and Visual Verse. She holds a Masters in Writing from Warwick University (UK) and was a 2016 fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. She is currently working on her first volume of poetry. She tweets @Aliceyousef.
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: