There are two stunning poems in The New Yorker and O Bod by the Palestinian poet Nasser Rabah, which have been co-translated by QC MFA professor Ammiel Alcalay. Go check them out! (Links below:)

“Untitled” (The New Yorker)
“A house that looks like your laugh” (O Bod)

Nasser Rabah was born in Gaza in 1963 and lives there. Like all Palestinians presently in Gaza, he and his family have been forcibly displaced. He got his BA in Agricultural Science in 1985, before going on to work as Director of the Communication Department in the Agriculture Ministry. He is a member of the Palestinian Writers and Authors Union and has published five collections of poetry, Running After Dead Gazelles (2003); One of Nobody (2010); Passersby with Light Clothes (2013); Water Thirsty for Water (2016); Eulogy for the Robin (2020), and a novel, Since approximately an hour (2018). Some of his poems have been translated into English, French, and Hebrew. The translators, Ammiel Alcalay, Khaled al-Hilli, and Emna Zghal, are working on a collection of Nasser Rabah’s poems for City Lights, due out in Spring 2025.

Emna Zghal is a Brooklyn-based visual artist. She was trained in both Tunisia and the United States and has shown her work in both countries and beyond. Reviews of her exhibits have appeared in the pages of The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Artforum, among other publications. Noted public collections include the Newark Museum, Flint Institute of Art, Yale University Library, The New York Public Library, The Africa Center, NY, and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY. emnazghal.com

Poet, novelist, translator, essayist, critic, and scholar Ammiel Alcalay’s over 20 books include After Jews and Arabs (University of Minnesota Press, 1992), Memories of Our Future (City Lights, 2001), and the forthcoming CONTROLLED DEMOLITION: a work in four books (Litmus Press).

Khaled al-Hilli teaches Arabic at New York University and is completing a doctorate at the CUNY Graduate Center on the post-2003 Iraqi novel. His Sargon Boulos: “This Great River” Translating the Beats into Arabic, is due out from Lost & Found in 2024.