Book Launch: Mona Kareem’s ‘I Will Not Fold These Maps,’ Tr. Sara Elkamel

Join us for the launch of Mona Kareem’s poetry collection *I WILL NOT FOLD THESE MAPS*, with Mona Kareem, translator Sara Elkamel, editor Nashwa Nasreldin, and hosted by ArabLit’s M. Lynx Qualey. Co-organized by the Poetry Translation Centre and ArabLit, this will be an hour of brilliant poetry & vibrant discussion.

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Mona Kareem is the author of three poetry collections. She is a recipient of a 2021 NEA literary grant, and a fellow at Center for the Humanities at Tufts University. She held fellowships and residencies with Princeton University, Poetry International, Arab-American National Museum, Norwich Center, and Forum Transregionale Studien. Her most recent publication Femme Ghosts is a trilingual chapbook published by Publication Studio in Fall 2019. Her work has been translated into nine languages, and appear in LitHub, The Common, Brooklyn Rail, Michigan Quarterly, Fence, Ambit, Poetry London, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Poetry International, PEN English, Modern Poetry in Translation, Two Lines, and Specimen. Kareem holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton. She has taught at Princeton, Tufts, University of Maryland College Park, SUNY Binghamton, Rutgers, and Bronx Community College. Her translations include Ashraf Fayadh’s Instructions Within (nominated for a BTBA award), Ra’ad Abdulqadir’s Except for this Unseen Thread (nominated for the Ghobash Banipalprize), and Octavia Butler’s Kindred.

Sara Elkamel is a poet, journalist, and translator living between Cairo and NYC. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Yale Review, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, and in the anthology Best New Poets (2020 & 2022), among publications. Elkamel was named the winner of the Redivider’s 2021 Blurred Genre Contest and the Tinderbox’s 2022 Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize. She is the author of the chapbook “Field of No Justice” (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021).

Nashwa Nasreldin is a freelance writer, editor and literary translator. She is the translator of the collaborative novel, Shatila Stories, and co-translator of Samar Yazbek’s memoir, The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria. She is a contributing editor of ArabLit Quarterly, a journal of Arabic literature in translation.