Months after Dr. Refaat Alareer was killed in Gaza by an Israeli targeted airstrike, authors, editors, and the publisher of the anthology Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, will come together to honor Refaat’s life, memory, and legacy.

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Featuring:

Asmaa Abu Mezied is an economic development and social inclusion specialist working to address issues of gender, development, and climate change in the agriculture sector. Her research interests focus on the care economy, women’s collectives organizing in economic sectors, the private sector’s social accountability, and the intersection of Palestinian political, agricultural, and environmental identities.

Jehad Abusalim is a scholar, writer, and public speaker completing his PhD in the History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies joint program at New York University. He worked with the American Friends Service Committee until 2022 when he became the Executive Director of the Jerusalem Fund in Washington, D.C.. He contributed to other anthologies including Gaza as Metaphor (Hurst Publishers, 2016) and Palestine: A Socialist Introduction (Haymarket Books, 2020).

Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, scholar, and librarian from Gaza. His debut book of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear (City Lights Books, 2022) won the Palestine Book Award and an American Book Award. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Walcott Poetry Prize. He is the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza. In 2019–20, he was a visiting poet and librarian-in-residence at Harvard University.

Yousef M. Aljamal is an author, journalist, and translator. He has published widely and is the co-translator of Prisoners Diaries: Palestinian Voices from the Israeli Gulag (2013), the translator of Dreaming of Freedom: Palestinian Child Prisoners Speak (2016), and a translator/coauthor of A Shared Struggle: Stories of Palestinian and Irish Hunger Strikers (2021). He was a contributor to Gaza Writes Back (Just World, 2013) and traveled on a speaking tour with Professor Alareer in 2014. Yousef recently completed his PhD from the Middle East Institute at Sakarya University, Turkey.

Shahd Abusalama is a PhD graduate from Sheffield Hallam University whose research explored the representation of Gaza-based refugees in colonial, humanitarian and Palestinian documentary films. She is a Palestinian artist and the author of the Palestine from My Eyes blog. She has contributed work to several publications, including academic and literary journals.

Moderator:

Jennifer Bing is the national director of the U.S. Palestine Activism Program at the American Friends Service Committee where she has worked since 1989, organizing hundreds of speaking tours, conferences, workshops, advocacy campaigns, and educational programs about Palestine and the Middle East. She is a co-editor with Jehad Abusalim and Michael Merryman-Lotze of Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire (Haymarket, 2022).

Photo credit: Sarah-Ji / Love+Struggle Photos

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This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our important publishing and programming work.