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Roundtable Discussion – A Year of War: A Conversation on Our Shared Future
October 24 @ 19:00
Free
The Markaz Review invites you to attend A YEAR OF WAR, A CONVERSATION ON OUR SHARED FUTURE: a roundtable with Samina Najmi, Ziad Suidan and Lina Mounzer, with special guest Mona Seif.
Following the publication of our October 2024 issue, FROM HERE, ONE YEAR ON, we invite you to participate in a discussion about the year of war that began on October 7, 2023, which has since spread into Lebanon and Yemen, with further hostilities expected between Israel and Iran. Israel has refused ceasefire proposals from the UN and the White House, and continues to bomb Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria. At the same time, many of the region’s inhabitants are living under despotic regimes, where freedom of expression is a daily danger, where dissidents are thrown into prison, women’s rights are curtailed, and religious minorities experience oppression or exile.
Samina Najmi, Ziad Suidan and Lina Mounzer will talk about their essays in FROM HERE, ONE YEAR ON, while Mona Seif will discuss discuss the continued imprisonment in Cairo of her brother Alaa Abd El-Fattah despite finishing his five year sentence (Alaa Abd El-Fattah is sharing the 2024 English PEN Pinter Prize with Arundati Roy, it was just announced.)
In this time of heightened tensions, genocide and war, with the entire Middle East region on edge, Nobel Prize Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi is calling for peace from her Evin Prison cell in Tehran, while millions march for peace in Palestine and Lebanon. Join us on October 24 for what is certain to be a passionate conversation, moderated by Lina Mounzer, senior editor at The Markaz Review.
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About the speakers:
Mona Seif grew up in a family of Egyptian activists. Her father Ahmed Seif was a human rights attorney and her brother Alaa Abd el-Fattah is a human rights activist and author. Mona is known for her participation in dissident movements during and after the 2011 Egyptian revolution, for her creative use of social media in campaigns, and for her work to end military trials for civilian protesters. She is a biology graduate student in the UK, investigating the BRCA1 breast cancer gene.
Samina Najmi teaches multiethnic US literatures at California State University, Fresno. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in World Literature Today, The Rumpus, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Her collection of essays, Sing Me a Circle, won the 2024 Aurora Polaris Award in creative nonfiction and will be published by Trio House Press in 2025. Samina grew up in Pakistan and England and raised her now-adult children in Fresno. Read her essay in our October issue: The Spark of Your Story, Ode to Aaron Bushnell.
Ziad Suidan is a lecturer at Haigazian University. He teaches English Literature, Cultural Studies and Communication Arts. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature in 2013 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation focused on the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and its poetics of exile.
Read his centerpiece essay in our latest issue: Witnessing Catastrophe: a Painter in Lebanon.