Your Stories Look Me In The Eyes - Palestine, Israel & Poetic Dialogue

Name: Your Stories Look Me In The Eyes - Palestine, Israel & Poetic Dialogue
Start: 2025-12-07T16:00:00+02:00
Location: Barlova

Schedule

Sun, 07 Dec, 2025 at 04:00 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Barlova | Tartu, TA

Basman Aldirawi (also published under Basman Derawi) is a Palestinian physiotherapist, writer and poet from Gaza. He has contributed dozens of stories/poems to the online platform We Are Not Numbers and other platforms including ArabLit, Mondoweiss and Vivamost. Also, participated as a co-author in the book Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, 2022 and the Arabic poetry anthology; Gaza, the land of poetry, 2021.

Michal Rubin was born and raised in Israel and has been living in Columbia, SC . She is a practicing psychotherapist, and a cantor. Poetry is her path of wrestling with the intermingling of her attachment to Israel, her birth place, and her anguish over the years of Israeli oppression of Palestinians, the occupation, and the war in Gaza. She lives with the complexity of having grandparents who were murdered in the Holocaust and being a member of a people who practices apartheid. Her poetry was published in various journals such as The Art and Science of Psychotherapy, Wrath Bearing Tree journal, Rise Up Journal, Palestine-Israel Journal, The New Verse News, Writers Resist, Dissident Voice, Writers Launch, Critical Muslims. She is the author of a chapbook, Home Visit, and three manuscripts “There are days that I am dead”, "Your stories look me in the eyes" with Basman Derawi (Fomite press), and “And the bones stay dry” (Muddy Ford Press).
Basman and Michal face each other, their stories look at each other in the eyes, as they navigate the difficulties of a shared history of intergenerational trauma. The poetry reading will be followed by a Q&A