Event: FEMINIST GIANT & The Strand Present: Noor Hindi + Kamelya Omayma Youssef

FEMINIST GIANT is teaming up with The Strand Book Store in New York City to launch a feminist book club! The goal is to have monthly events—a combination of in-person and online—that will feature exciting and global feminist books.

I’m excited to announce our first event of 2023 and delighted that it features the debut collections of two brilliant poets—Noor Hindi and her Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow and Kamelya Omayma Youssef with her A book with a hole in it.

Noor and Kamelya will join me at an in-person discussion on January 27, hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

This event is FREE to attend.

Can’t make the event?

Purchase a signed copy of Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow here.

Purchase a signed copy of A book with a hole in it here.

About Dear God, Dear Bones, Dear Yellow:

Arab womanhood, migration, queerness and Palestine are navigated with striking lyricism and urgency in Noor Hindi’s defiant collection.

What is political poetry? How does history become lived experience? What does it mean to bear witness through writing?

Noor Hindi’s poems explore colonialism, religion, patriarchy and everything in between with sharp wit and innovative precision. Layered to reflect the intersections of her identity, while constantly interrogating this identity itself, her writing combines lyrical beauty with political urgency.

This collection is ultimately a provocation―on trauma, on art, on what it takes to change the world.

Noor is currently editing a Palestinian global anglophone anthology with George Abraham (Haymarket Books, 2024). She is a 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow.

About A book with a hole in it:

Kamelya Omayma Youssef’s A book with a hole in it uses the poetry of the fragment and the language of everyday survival to gesture towards the fallibility of language at the juncture of the multiple, intersecting wars on women, on "terror," on the non-White body, and on people and language in diaspora. Drawn from a set of journals written over a four-month period, A book with a hole in it throws the formal, official work of poetry into relief, asking what knowledge exists beyond knowledge, which silences are too deep to be surfaced on the page, and how to pierce through trauma and violence to approach a politics of redemption.

Kamelya Omayma Youssef's A book with a hole in it is the 2020 Carolyn Bush Award recipient.

Kamelya currently teaches poetry at the City College of New York, edits poetry manuscripts, and co-facilitates Habibi Futurism, a generative workshop for collective futurist imaginings.

More information here on how to get tickets, buy Noor and Kamelya’s books, donate to FEMINIST GIANT. and the Strand in-person event Covid-19 policy.

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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.  

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