Tuesday, October 7, 2025, 4:30pm to 6:00pm - CMES, Rm 10238 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA
The Center for Middle Eastern Studies presents: “Crossings: Writing into the Maelstrom and the Poetry of Witness"
with Lisa Majaj, PhD - Poet, writer, editor and scholar
Lisa Suhair Majaj is a poet, writer, scholar, editor, and children’s author. She holds a BA from the American University of Beirut and an MA in English Literature, an MA in American Culture, and a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Her poetry collection "Geographies of Light" won the 2008 Del Sol Press Poetry Prize. Select poems have been translated into Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, Lithuanian, German, Indonesian, Malayalam, and Chinese. Her poetry was displayed in the exhibition 'Aftermath: The Fallout of War—America and the Middle East' at the Harn Museum of Art, 2016 and was used in the 2024 limited-edition art book "Passport of Witness".
Her scholarly work includes the co-edited critical volumes "Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women's Novels", "Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist", "Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers", and the forthcoming "The Companion to Contemporary Arab American Literature". Her writing appears in the recent anthologies "Heaven Looks Like Us" (Haymarket), "Unsilenced: Poems for Palestine" (Horizons and Daraja Press), "Ask the Night for a Dream: Palestinian Writing from the Diaspora" (Palestine Writes Press) and "Fifty Poems for Palestine" (Dahlia Books). Her new poetry collection "Why Doesn’t the Sky Love Us?" is forthcoming. She may be reached at lisamajaj@gmail.com.
Link: https://cmes.fas.harvard.edu/event/crossings-writing-maelstrom-and-poetry-witness