Virtual: THE MOON THAT TURNS YOU BACK by Hala Alyan

Please join us for a virtual poetry reading celebrating THE MOON THAT TURNS YOU BACK by Hala Alyan! She will be joined in conversation by Safia Elhillo, author most recently of Bright Red Fruit and Girls that Never Die.

This is a virtual event that will be hosted on Zoom Webinar. To access the link to this event, registration is required.

From the author of The Arsonists’ City and The Twenty-Ninth Year, a new collection of poetry that traces the fragmentation of memory, archive, and family–past, present, future–in the face of displacement and war.

A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection—a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and houses hold archival material for one another, tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Boundaries and borders blur between space and time and poetic form—small banal moments of daily life live within geopolitical brutalities and, vice versa, the desire for stability lives in familiarity with displacement.

These poems take stock of who and what can displace you from home and from your own body—and, conversely, the kind of resilience, tenacity, and love that can bring you back into yourself and into the context of past and future generations. Hala Alyan asks, What stops you from transforming into someone or something else? When you have lived a life in flux, how do you find rest?

Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Her latest novel, The Arsonists’ City, was a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, Literary Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.

Safia Elhillo is an award-winning poet and author. Her debut YA novel in verse, Home Is Not a Country, was longlisted for the National Book Award and received a Coretta Scott King Author Honor and an Arab American Book Award. Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, Safia is a Pushcart Prize nominee, co-winner of the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and listed in Forbes Africa's 2018 "30 Under 30." She lives in Los Angeles.

Accessibility: This event will be hosted on Zoom Webinar, which has closed captions. For other questions or access needs, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com.