Lenna Jawdat: 70,000 at the Baltimore Book Festival

A conversation about Lenna Jawdat's 70,000: an "embodied meditation on cultural displacement, memory, and resilience."
About this Event

We’re so excited to see you at the Baltimore Book Festival, where you can visit us at our booth on Sept. 13-14. On Sunday, September 14th, we are thrilled to be hosting the 31st St. Stage!

At 1PM, join us for an event with Lenna Jawdat celebrating her powerful new poetry collection 70,000!

70,000 is a visceral and inventive poetry collection inspired by the removal of approximately 70,000 books from Palestinian homes and private libraries before and during the events of 1948. Of those books, most have not been returned; about 6,000 remain housed in Israeli national collections, where they are largely inaccessible to Palestinians.

A powerful act of remembrance and resistance, 70,000 transforms cultural erasure into an archive of grief, memory, and hope.

Lenna Jawdat is a poet, writer, and psychotherapist of Palestinian and Iraqi descent. Her work has been published in Poet Lore, The Massachusetts Review, The Margins, and elsewhere. She was a 2021 Best of the Net nominee, an artist in residence at Sundress Academy for the Arts (2023) and Vermont Studio Center (2025) and a Tin House alum. Lenna received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in May 2024. Her debut book, 70,000, was selected for Summer/Fall 2026 Indies Introduce and July 2026 Indies Next by the American Booksellers Association. She lives in DC on the ancestral land of the Anacostan people.