Doha Kahlout: From Gaza, A Poetic and Visual Testimony

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Blending together music, text, and images, Doha Kahlout will trace her experience of displacement within and out of Gaza through poetry and photographs. Doha will read in Arabic, and the novelist and former Institute for Ideas and Imagination Fellow Isabella Hammad, will accompany her with the English translation by Yasmine Haj.

Artists

Doha Kahlout is a Palestinian poet and teacher of Arabic. In 2018, Kahlout published her first collection of poetry, Ashbah ("Similarities"), with Dar Tarik Publishing House. She has also contributed to publications of the Qattan Foundation and Dar Tibaq Publishing House. During her residency at Reid Hall, her essay “The Road from Gaza” was published in translation by the New York Review, and she participated in panels of Palestinian poets at the Marché de la poésie in Paris. While still stranded in Gaza in January 2025, Kahlout organized her first Reid Hall event, Artmaking in Crisis, featuring performances, poetry, and a film screening.

Isabella Hammad is a British-Palestinian author of The Parisian and Enter Ghost. She won a 2019 National Book Award “5 Under 35” and received the 2020 Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, MacDowell, the Santa Maddalena Foundation, and the Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation, and has taught creative writing in the graduate programs at New York University and Brown University.

Bashar Murad is a Palestinian Pop artist, singer/songwriter, and filmmaker producing globally influenced pop music rooted in Palestinian spirit. His music challenges stereotypes and highlights social issues facing Palestinian youth that are seldom addressed in Palestine, including living under the occupation, within patriarchal settings. His music and work also address gender equality and gender diversity.

English translations by Yasmine Haj

Reid Hall Displaced Artists Initiative

Co-sponsored by the Columbia Global Paris Center and Institute for Ideas and Imagination, the Displaced Artists Initiative is designed to support artists who have had to leave their countries of origin due to extreme circumstances (war, natural disaster, political oppression). The 2025 – 2026 residents are Palestinian poet Doha Kahlout, Palestinian visual artist Maha Al-Daya, and Belarusian journalist and political analyst Hanna Liubakova.

Venue

This event will take place in Reid Hall’s Grande Salle Ginsberg-LeClerc, built in 1912 and extensively renovated in 2023 thanks to the generous support of Judith Ginsberg and Paul LeClerc.

Reid Hall, the Columbia Global Paris Center, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination are not responsible for the views and opinions expressed by their speakers and guests.

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