Wednesday, May 28 | 6:30-8:30 PM ET | The People’s Forum,  320 West 37th Street, New York | Free!

A literary reading & conversation plumbing the responsibilities of writers in the constant wartime of empire. How can literature intervene in the collective imagination, disrupt imperial surfaces, and forge new commitments to shared liberation?

Featuring readings by André Dao, Sara Aziza, Cathy Linh Che, and George Abraham from their respective new books Anam, The Hollow Half, Becoming Ghost, and HEAVEN LOOKS LIKE US: Palestinian Poetry. Moderated by curator-troublemaker lawrence-minh bùi davis. Organized by Kaya Press.

GEORGE ABRAHAM (they/هو) is a Palestinian American poet, essayist, critic, performance artist. They are the author of When the Arab Apocalypse Comes to America (Haymarket, 2026) and Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020), which won the Arab American Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. They are editor at large of Mizna, and co-editor of HEAVEN LOOKS LIKE US: Palestinian Poetry (Haymarket, 2025). They are a graduate of Northwestern’s Litowitz MFA+MA program, and teach at Amherst College as a Writer-in-Residence.

SARAH AZIZA is a Palestinian American writer, translator, and artist with roots in ‘Ibdis and Deir al-Balah, Gaza. She asks you to do your part in the fight to liberate Palestine, and all people. The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship and numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, Sarah has published work in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Best American Essays, the Guardian, the Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, and the Nation, among other venues. She is the author of The Hollow Half, a genre-bending memoir of Palestinian diaspora, resistance, and return.

CATHY LINH CHE is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), Split (Alice James Books) and co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books). Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY, and her film We Were the Scenery won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival. She teaches as Core Faculty in Poetry at the low residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles. She lives in New York City.

ANDRÉ DAO is an author and researcher from Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. His debut novel, Anam, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction and the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing. He is the co-founder of Behind the Wire, an award-winning oral history project documenting the stories of the adults and children who have been detained by the Australian government after seeking asylum in Australia.

Moderator lawrence-minh bùi davis is a refugee diaspore, curator, writer, troublemaker, and cinnamon roll who lives as a guest on the ancestral lands of the Piscataway Nation. A co-founder of the arts anti-profit AALR, the Asian American Literature Festival, and the Center for Refugee Poetics, he believes in stewardship of literature as social and ethical ecosystem. Sometimes you can see new things by the light of his neurodivergence.