Poems by Nasser Rabah, Amanee Izhaq and Mai Al-Nakib
Three poets pay tribute to the struggle in Gaza, the West Bank and the world over for Palestinian freedom and a future without war.
Wiam El-Tamami
Nasser Rabah is a poet and novelist from Gaza. He has published five poetry collections and two novels. In English, his work has been featured in publications such as The New Yorker, Words Without Borders, Literary Hub, ArabLit, Michigan Quarterly Review, O Bod, and Poetry International. A new collection of his selected poetry is coming out in English translation with City Lights in Spring 2025, along with two collections in Spanish. He is a 2024 Jean-Jacques Rousseau fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Germany.
Amanee Izhaq is an award–winning Palestinian–American poet and producer through Be Still Media Foundation. Her work has been featured in the United Nations, Falastin Literary Magazine, Palestine Festival of Literature, Los Angeles Poet Society Press, LA This Week, KPFK 90.7 FM, LA River Arts, and more. She has taught and performed across the US alongside poet laureates. Her writing is influenced by hakawati, the ancient Arab art of storytelling, given that her great-grandfather Khaleel was the village hakawati of his time.
Mai Al-Nakib was born in Kuwait and spent the first six years of her life in London; Edinburgh; and St. Louis, Missouri. She holds a PhD in English literature from Brown University. She was an Associate Professor of English and comparative literature at Kuwait University, where she taught for twenty years; she recently left this position to write full-time. Her research focuses on cultural politics in the Middle East, with a special emphasis on gender, cosmopolitanism, and postcolonial issues. Her short story collection, The Hidden Light of Objects, was published by Bloomsbury in 2014. It won the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s First Book Award. Her debut novel, An Unlasting Home—published by Mariner Books in the US and Saqi in the UK—came out in paperback in April 2023. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in various publications, including Ninth Letter; The First Line; After the Pause; World Literature Today; Rowayat; New Lines Magazine; and the BBC World Service. She divides her time between Kuwait and Greece.
Wiam El-Tamami is an Egyptian writer, translator, and editor. Her writing and translation work has been featured in publications such as Granta, Ploughshares, Freeman’s, CRAFT, ArabLit, Social Movement Studies, The Sun Magazine, Jadaliyya, and Banipal, and is forthcoming in AGNI, The Common, and The Massachusetts Review. It has also been published in several anthologies. She won the 2011 Harvill Secker Translation Prize, was a finalist for the 2023 Disquiet International Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2024 First Pages Prize. Her work has also received a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2024. She is currently based in Berlin.