Join AAWW in our new space for a celebration of The Hollow Half, an urgent and groundbreaking memoir by Sarah Aziza, one of the most important new voices in contemporary literature and criticism. Sarah will be in conversation with Hannah Bae, with featured readings by Kamelya Omayma Youssef, Ghinwa Jawhari, H. Sinno, and Ladan Khoddam-Khorasani.
PLEASE NOTE: IN PERSON TICKETS ARE SOLD OUT.
RSVP FOR THE LIVE STREAM HERE!
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A brush with death. An ancestral haunting. A century of family secrets. Sarah Aziza’s searing, genre-bending memoir traces three generations of diasporic Palestinians from Gaza to the Midwest to New York City—and back
“You were dead, Sarah, you were dead.” In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is narrowly saved after being hospitalized for an eating disorder. The doctors revive her body, but it is no simple thing to return to the land of the living. Aziza’s crisis is a rupture that brings both her ancestral and personal past into vivid presence. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a mysterious incident summons the familiar voice of her deceased Palestinian grandmother.
In the months following, as she responds to a series of ghostly dreams, Aziza unearths family secrets that reveal the ways her own trauma and anorexia echo generations of violent Palestinian displacement and erasure—and how her fight to recover builds on a century of defiant survival and love. As she moves towards this legacy, Aziza learns to resist the forces of colonization, denial, and patriarchy both within and outside her.
Weaving timelines, languages, geographies, and genres, The Hollow Half probes the contradictions and contingencies that create “nation” and “history.” Blazing with honesty, urgency, and poetry, this stunning debut memoir is a fearless call to imagine both the self and the world anew.
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Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer, translator, and artist with roots in ‘Ibdis and Deir al-Balah, Gaza. The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship and numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, she has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, South Africa, the West Bank, and the United States. Her award-winning journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, Lux, The Washington Post, The Intercept, The Rumpus, NPR, The Margins, and The Nation, among other publications.
Hannah Bae is a Korean American freelance journalist, nonfiction writer and illustrator who is at work on a memoir about family estrangement and mental illness. She is the 2020 nonfiction winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a 2021 and 2022 Peter Taylor Fellow for The Kenyon Review Writers Workshops. She is a proud former student of Evelina’s. You can connect with her at @hanbae on Twitter and @hannahbae on Instagram.
Kamelya Omayma Youssef is the author of A book with a hole in it (Wendy’s Subway, 2022). Her work has been published with Mizna, The Margins, 1080press, PoetLore, and also her friends’ zines. She adjuncts in NYC and teaches workshops with her friends; the latest being Habibi Futurism with Leila Abdelrazaq and Levon Kafafian. She and you will see a free Palestine in this lifetime.
Ghinwa Jawhari is the author of the chapbook BINT (2021), which was selected by Aria Aber for Radix Media’s inaugural Own Voices Chapbook Prize. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, she is the founding editor of Koukash Review. Her essays, fiction, and poetry appear in Catapult, Mizna, The Adroit Journal, Rusted Radishes, The Margins, Narrative, and elsewhere.
Ladan Khoddam-Khorasani (she/they) is a poet, educator and public health practitioner. She is interested
in how we can use poetry and language to take care of one another.
H. Sinno is a composer-performer, writer, and designer based in New York. They have been the lyricist and front-person for Mashrou Leila since 2008, engaging conversations around representation, free speech, gender justice, and sexual freedoms in the Middle East. H has a BFA from the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut, and an MA in Digital Musics from Dartmouth College where they analyzed the vocal organ and digital vocality as sites of political negotiation. Their writing has been published by Poetry Project, Frieze Magazine, The Derivative, Theater Magazine, Bard College & others. Their debut full-length opera, Westerly Breath, was in development at The Industry Los Angeles, and opened at the New York Met Museum in January 2024. Westerly Breath braids Egyptian mythology, and architectural history into a semi-autobiographical portrait of queer trauma, leveraging myth, monument, and memoir as vectors of dismemberment and remembrance. Their solo debut, Poems of Consumption, opened at London’s Barbican Centre in July 2023, and is currently on tour in the US. Partially inspired by Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, Poems of Consumption is a song cycle built on poetry published in Amazon customer reviews, covering themes like ennui, surveillance capitalism, heartbreak, boycotts, and orientalism, with compositions that juxtapose harsh electronica with the whimsy of a string quartet.
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COMMUNITY CARE & ACCESSIBILITY
At AAWW, the safety and comfort of our community is our top priority. We invite you to practice intentionality and care in your behavior and language when engaging with our programs and with each other. Violence of any kind, including but not limited to racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, class or casteism, bigotry or bias toward religion or faith, or any action or assault against marginalized identities, is not tolerated. Those who bring harm to our community in person or online are not welcome, and will be asked to exit the space.
The event will be live streamed on Zoom with auto captioning for those who cannot join us in person. For those joining us in person, we are located on the 18 West 21st Street, Suite 900, there is an elevator that will take you directly to our office. Masks are required for audience members for all AAWW events; if you forget yours, one will be provided for you. We have three commercial grade air purifiers. We highly encourage all in person guests to take a COVID test at home prior to the event. If you have had COVID or have had known contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID in the 10 days prior, we ask you tune in for the live stream instead. Please reach out to msaleh@aaww.org for additional accessibility requests, including ADA accessible bathrooms, chairs with added back support, and beyond. This space is for YOU!
