Offsite: Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Something About Living w/ special guests!

Event guidelines:

• All attendees are required to wear a face mask at all times.
• Tickets are limited to restrict capacity.
• Additional copies of the readers' books will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• The event will also be livestreamed for free on YouTube: https://youtube.com/live/r8tBiDXMQB0
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].

It’s nearly impossible to write poetry that holds the human desire for joy and the insistent agitations of protest at the same time, but Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s gorgeous and wide-ranging new collection Something About Living does just that.

Her poems interweave Palestine’s historic suffering, the challenges of living in this world full of violence and ill will, and the gentle delights we embrace to survive that violence. Khalaf Tuffaha’s elegant poems sing the fractured songs of Diaspora while remaining clear-eyed to the cause of the fracturing: the multinational hubris of colonialism and greed.

This collection is her witness to our collective unraveling, vowel by vowel, syllable by syllable. “Let the plural be a return of us” the speaker of “On the Thirtieth Friday We Consider Plurals” says and this plurality is our tenuous humanity and the deep need to hang on to kindness in our communities. In these poems Khalaf Tuffaha reminds us that love isn’t an idea; it is a radical act. Especially for those who, like this poet, travel through the world vigilantly, but steadfastly remain heart first. —Adrian Matejka, author of Somebody Else Sold the World

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is the author of three books of poetry, Water & Salt, winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award, Kaan and Her Sisters (Trio House Press, 2023), and Something About Living, winner of the 2022 Akron Poetry Prize, (University of Akron Press, 2024). Tuffaha's work has been published or is in journals including Los Angeles Review of Books, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Nation, Poetry, Prairie Schooner. and Protean. She was the 2022 curator of the translation series, Poems from Palestine at the Baffler magazine. She is currently curating a monthly feature on Palestinian writing at Words Without Borders entitled “Against Forgetting.”

Lara Atallah is a multidisciplinary artist and writer. Her practice explores the political dimensions of landscape, probing both the futility and fluidity of borders as manmade constructs. Her writing has appeared in Vera List Center for Arts and Politics, Camera Austria, Flash Art Italia, Koukash, 128Lit, among others. She is the author of Edge of Elysium, Vol.1 (Open Projects Press, 2019) and Exit signs on a seaside highway (Everybody Press, 2023).

Marwa Helal is a poet and journalist. She is the author of (Nightboat Books, 2022), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, (Nightboat Books, 2019), the chapbook I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No Dear, 2017) and a Belladonna chaplet (2021). She has been awarded fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the Hawthornden Foundation, New York Foundation of the Arts, Jerome Foundation, Poets House, and Cave Canem, among others. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Paris Review, POETRY Magazine, Boston Review, and Best American Experimental Writing 2018. She has presented her work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum and the Guggenheim Museum. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, she currently lives in the United States. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from The New School and her BA in journalism and international studies from Ohio Wesleyan University.

Monica Sok is the author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Kundiman, MacDowell, National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Society of America, and the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, New Republic, Paris Review, and Kenyon Review, among others. She was born and raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

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