GATEKEEPERS: Arab Writers, Editors & Publishers Confront Mainstream Opposition

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The Markaz Review presents GATEKEEPERS: Arab Writers, Editors & Publishers Confront Mainstream Opposition, a roundtable with Palestinian authors/publishers/editors Michel Moushabeck and Hannah Moushabeck, and author/publisher/editor Ammiel Alcalay. Free speech and the freedom to publish inconvenient truths during the war on Gaza; what hoops and misconceptions do writers and publishers from the region face; and who gatekeepers in popular Western publishing are some of the topics for the panel, which will be moderated by TMR editors Jordan Elgrably & Malu Halasa.

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About the speakers:

Michel Moushabeck is the founder of the independently owned Interlink Books (1987), which has an active list of over 1,000 titles and has published more Arab authors than any other US publisher. He is also a writer, editor, and musician of Palestinian Arab descent. In April this year he received the Arab American of the Year Award from ACCESS in Detroit. Moushabeck lectures frequently on Arabic music and literature in translation. He plays music almost daily; is an avid hiker and mountain climber; and is a rather obsessive collector of jazz and world music, world percussion instruments, books, old maps, and contemporary art.

Hannah Moushabeck is a second-generation Palestinian American author and book worker who was raised in a family of publishers and booksellers and learned the power of literature at a young age. Hannah has worked in publishing for over a decade at companies such as Chronicle Books, The Quarto Group, and Simon & Schuster. She now runs Interlink Publishing, the only Palestinian-owned publisher in the United States, alongside her family. Her debut picture book Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine (Chronicle Books) won The New England Book Award and The Arab American Book Award. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts on the homelands of the Pocumtuc and Nipmuc Nations.

Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, novelist, translator, essayist, critic, and scholar. Among his more than 20 books are After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture; Memories of Our Future; a little history; and the forthcoming Follow the Person: Archival Encounters, as well as CONTROLLED DEMOLITION: a work in four books. His co-translation of Palestinian poet Nasser Rabah’s Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece, is due out in early 2025. He received an American Book Award in for his work as founder and General Editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and is a Distinguished Professor at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Read his essay in our latest issue: My Life Among the Gatekeepers

Moderators

Jordan Elgrably is an American, French and Moroccan writer and translator whose stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in many anthologies and reviews, including Apulée, Salmagundi, and the Paris Review. Editor-in-chief and founder of The Markaz Review, he is the cofounder and former director of the Levantine Cultural Center/The Markaz in Los Angeles (2001–2020). He is the editor of Stories From the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction (City Lights, 2024), and co-editor with Malu Halasa of Sumūd: a New Palestinian Reader (Seven Stories, 2024), Based in Montpellier, France and California, he tweets @JordanElgrably.

Read the editorial in our latest issue: Why GATEKEEPERS?

Malu Halasa, literary editor at The Markaz Review, is a London-based writer and editor. Her latest book as editor is Woman Life Freedom: Voices and Art From the Women’s Protests in Iran (Saqi 2023). Her six previous co-edited anthologies include Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline, with coedited with Zaher Omareen & Nawara Mahfoud; The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie: Intimacy and Design, with Rana Salam; and the short series: Transit Beirut: New Writing and Images, with Rosanne Khalaf, and Transit Tehran: Young Iran and Its Inspirations, with Maziar Bahari. She was managing editor of the Prince Claus Fund Library; a founding editor of Tank Magazine and Editor at Large for Portal 9. As a freelance journalist in London, she has covered wide-ranging subjects, from water as occupation in Israel/Palestine to Syrian comics during the present-day conflict. Her books, exhibitions and lectures chart a changing Middle East. Malu Halasa’s debut novel, Mother of All Pigs was reviewed by the New York Times as “a microcosmic portrait of … a patriarchal order in slow-motion decline.” She tweets at @halasamalu.

Read her essay in our latest issue: Featured Artists—”Barred From Home”

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