Hala Alyan Reads From The Moon That Turns You Back

Join BPL Presents for a reading and talk with Hala Alyan, the author of The Arsonists’ City and The Twenty-Ninth Year, who will discuss The Moon That Turns You Back, a new collection of poetry that traces the fragmentation of memory, archive, and family–past, present, future–in the face of displacement and war.

A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection—a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and houses hold archival material for one another, tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Boundaries and borders blur between space and time and poetic form—small banal moments of daily life live within geopolitical brutalities and, vice versa, the desire for stability lives in familiarity with displacement.

These poems take stock of who and what can displace you from home and from your own body—and, conversely, the kind of resilience, tenacity, and love that can bring you back into yourself and into the context of past and future generations. Hala Alyan asks, What stops you from transforming into someone or something else? When you have lived a life in flux, how do you find rest? Other poets will read with Hala, followed by a Q&A.

Books will be available for purchase from Greenlight Bookstore, followed by a signing.

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Participants

Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Her latest novel, The Arsonists’ City, was a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, Literary Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.

 

 

Sara Deniz Akant is a poet, educator, and performer. She is the author of three books — most recently, Hyperphantasia (Rescue Press 2022), which was a New York Times book of the year, a Boston Globe book of the year, and won the Massachusetts Book Award in poetry. She is also the author of Babette (Rescue Press 2015), winner of the Black Box Poetry Prize, and Parades (Omnidawn 2014), winner of the Chapbook Prize. She teaches poetry as a Professor of the Practice at Tufts University, and co-curates the Kan Yama Kan reading series in Brooklyn. @kan.yama.kan.bk

 

 

 

Zaina Arafat is a Palestinian-American writer and the author of You Exist Too Much, which won a 2021 Lambda Literary Award and was named Roxane Gay's favorite book of the year. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, The Believer, Granta. BuzzFeed and elsewhere. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in Brooklyn. Photo credit Carleen Coulter

 

 

Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer who splits her time between New York City and the Middle East. Previously a Fulbright fellow in Jordan, she has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, South Africa, and the West Bank. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times, Lux Magazine, the Intercept, NPR, and the Nation, among others. She is the recipient of numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a 2022 resident at Tin House Books and a 2023 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers' Workshop. Her forthcoming book is a hybrid work of memoir, lyricism, and oral history exploring the intertwined legacies of diaspora, colonialism, and the American dream.

 

Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her third poetry collection, O, won the 2023 Arab American Book Award for Poetry and was named a Best Book of the Year by Literary Hub and The New York Public Library. Her previous full-length collections are Louder than Hearts, winner of the 2016 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, and To Live in Autumn, winner of the 2013 Backwaters Prize. She’s also the author of two chapbooks: 3arabi Song, winner of the 2016 Rattle Chapbook prize, and There Was and How Much There Was, a 2016 Laureate’s Choice selected by Carol Ann Duffy. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, LARB, Lithub, Guernica, The Nation, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. She’s the co-creator and co-host, with poet Farah Chamma, of Maqsouda, a podcast in Arabic about Arabic poetry. After a lifetime in Lebanon and a decade in Dubai, Zeina has recently moved with her family to California.

Mahogany L. Browne, selected as Kennedy Center's Next 50 and Wesleyan's 2022-23 Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, the Executive Director of JustMedia, Artistic Director of Urban Word, is a writer, playwright, organizer, & educator. Browne has received fellowships from All Arts, Arts for Justice, Air Serenbe, Baldwin for the Arts, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research, & Rauschenberg. She is the author of recent works: Vinyl Moon, Chlorine Sky (optioned for Steppenwolf Theater), Black Girl Magic, and banned books: Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice, and Woke Baby. Founder of the diverse lit initiative Woke Baby Book Fair, Browne is currently touring her latest poetry collection Chrome Valley which received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was highlighted in The New York Times.

She is the first-ever poet-in-residence at Lincoln Center and works on her first adult fiction in Brooklyn, NY.