For National Arab American Heritage Month, observed annually during the month of April, we asked our member magazines and presses to share with us some of the work by Arab American writers that they recommend reading in celebration.
Poetry
Nightboat Books | 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64362-110-4
Abi-Karam’s second poetry collection “foments political action in public spaces, and indexes the various emotional states, such as rage, revelry, fear, grief, and desire to which queers must tend during protest.”
Border Wisdom by Ahmad Almallah
Winter Editions | 2023
ISBN: 978-1-959708-06-3
This poetry collection “blurs the borders between languages, between the living and the dead, between presence and absence.”
Fonograf Editions | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-964499-48-2
In this poetry collection traversing European cities, Almallah “encounters the impossibility of being a Palestinian, left alone in a world full of sympathizers and enemies.”
The Wild Fox of Yemen by Threa Almontaser
Graywolf Press | 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64445-050-5
Almontaser’s debut poetry collection is “a love letter to the country and people of Yemen, a portrait of young Muslim womanhood in New York after 9/11, and an extraordinarily composed examination of what it means to carry in the body the echoes of what came before.”
One Hundred Hungers by Lauren Camp
Tupelo Press | 2016
ISBN: 978-1-936797-72-1
This poetry collection “explores the lives of a first-generation Arab-American girl and her Jewish-Iraqi parent,” telling “overlapping stories of food and ritual, immigration and adaptation.”
Copper Canyon Press | 2020
ISBN: 978-1-55659-589-9
In her debut full-length collection, Chatti explores “themes of shame, illness, grief, and gender, transmuting religious narratives through the lens of a young Arab-American woman suffering a taboo female affliction.”
I Want You to Know by Mona Damluji
Seven Stories Press | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64421-441-1
According to Aya Ghanameh, this poem with illustrations by Ishtar Bäcklund Dakhil “offers young readers a meaningful way to explore the complexities of family heritage, displacement, and the lasting effects of war.”
The January Children by Safia Elhillo
African Poetry Book Fund | 2017
ISBN: 9780803295988
Elhillo’s collection “depicts displacement and longing while also questioning accepted truths about geography, history, nationhood, and home.”
Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo by Hazem Fahmy
Half Mystic | 2022
ISBN: 978-1948552110
This poetry collection “uses the singer’s iconic music and persona as a guidepost to a firmer understanding of the self and the spaces that define it.”
Milkweed Editions & Out-Spoken Press | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-63955-128-6
In these poems, Joudah “offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens–a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be–and asks their reader to be changed by them.”
Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance by Fady Joudah
Milkweed Editions | 2018
ISBN: 9781571315014
Joudah’s fourth poetry collection features “love poems to the lovely and unlovely, the loved and unloved,” as well as a collaboration with Golan Haji, a Kurdish Syrian writer, to “foreground the imaginative act of constructing memory and history.”
Fugitive Atlas by Khaled Mattawa
Graywolf Press | 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64445-037-6
Mattawa’s latest poetry collection is “a sweeping, impassioned account of refugee crises, military occupations, and ecological degradation, an acute and probing journey through a world in upheaval.”
Alice James Books | 2015
ISBN: 978-1-938584-09-1
According to Fady Joudah, in this book “we encounter the poet’s inventive vision of art, and also his unforgettable tenderness: his songs to the world of children and to the children of the world.”
Voice/Poems by Susan Azar Porterfield
Trio House Press | 2025
ISBN: 978-1949487466
According to Zeeshan Pathan, Porterfield is a “master of restraint and deeply mines the domestic interior of her life in poem after poem.”
Tupelo Press | 2020
ISBN: 978-1-946482-40-2
According to Zeina Hashem Beck, “borrowing their structure from Muslim prayer…these poems remind the reader that poetry is a kind of prayer, that any prayer is a kind of searching.”
Kaan and Her Sisters by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Trio House Press | 2023
ISBN: 978-1-949487-14-5
This poetry collection “illuminates the work of grief and survival, the sordid legacies of official historical record and the liberatory practice of intimate narration.”
A book with a hole in it by Kamelya Omayma Youssef
Wendy’s Subway | 2022
ISBN: 978-1-7359242-9-8
This poetry collection explores “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.”
Thank You For The Window Office by Maged Zaher
Ugly Duckling Presse | 2012
ISBN: 978-1-933254-97-5
In this poetry collection, Zaher “investigates the subtleties of place and identity in late-capitalism, the corporate world, and the dating scene.”
Trio House Press | 2022
ISBN: 978-1-949487-12-1
Zineh’s “capturing of the romantic and violent, the personal and the political, is a testament to his unwavering dedication to plumbing the depths of emotion that lie in psychological and physical territories alike.”
trace press | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-775-2567-6-2
Edited by Norah Alkharashi and Yasmine Haj, this bilingual poetry anthology—in which “language dissolves into cities, landscapes, or portals that open to rubble, or only air”—features George Abraham, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Zeena Faulk, Miled Faiza, and more poets and translators writing in Arabic and English.
Fiction
Country of Origin by Dalia Azim
Deep Vellum | 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64605-152-6
This debut novel is a “multigenerational family saga that cuts between political revolution in 1950s Egypt and the personal revolutions of four family members whose lives intersect around the disappearance of one of their own.”
Golden Threads by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
Ayin Press | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961814-21-9
This book for middle-grade readers “will take people of all ages on a journey into the multi-faith world of Morocco’s craftspeople, inspiring generative conversations about art, labor, community, and technology for years to come.”
We Walked On by Therese Soukar Chehade
Regal House Publishing | 2024
ISBN: 978-1646035205
Set during Lebanon’s civil war, Chehade’s novel “immerses readers in the landscape of war, weaving political unrest into everyday life.”
Is This How You Eat a Watermelon? by Zein El-Amine
Radix Media | 2022
ISBN: 978-1-7377184-2-0
The seven stories in this collection “span war-torn Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United States to tell stories of transit and survival.”
Him, Me, Muhammad Ali by Randa Jarrar
Sarabande Books | 2016
ISBN: 978-1-941411-31-5
The stories in Jarrar’s collection “grapple with love, loss, displacement, and survival in a collection that moves seamlessly between realism and fable, history and the present.”
Nothing Vast by Moshe Zvi Marvit
Acre Books | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-946724-79-3
This novel is a “sweeping multigenerational tale” that “complicates traditional narratives as it follows two families—one Moroccan, one Polish—filled with Zionists, anti-Zionists, socialists, and reactionaries.”
Temporary People by Deepak Unnikrishnan
Restless Books | 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63206-142-3
In twenty-eight stories, Unnikrishnan follows guest workers “brought in to construct the towering monuments to wealth that punctuate the skylines of Abu Dhabi and Dubai.”
Nonfiction & Cross-Genre Works
The Weight of Ghosts by Laila Halaby
Red Hen Press | 2023
ISBN: 978-1-63628-134-6
This memoir is “a lyrical reclaiming and an insistence by the author that she own the rights to her story, which is American flavored with an unreleasing elsewhere.”
Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in an Egyptian Prison by Ahmed Naji
McSweeney’s | 2020
ISBN: 978-1952119835
This chronicle of Naji’s time in prison “stands as a testament to the power of the creative mind, in the face of authoritarian censorship.”
Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before the Nakba
Haymarket Books | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-64259-980-0
Edited by Teresa Aranguren and Sandra Barrilaro, this book is “a unique, stunning collection of images of Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and a testament to the vibrancy of Palestinian society prior to occupation.”
Literary Magazines
Against Silence: A Palestinian Writing Series
Words Without Borders | 2024
Selected and introduced by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, this series “seeks to address the relative lack of Palestinian writing available in English translation, and just as crucially, the paucity of critical engagement with the literature that already exists.”
“Sandstorm” by Rasha Alduwaisan
The Common | 2021
This poem begins, “There’s an itch in my throat like fox fur, / broom bush, cactus whittled to dust, / and my son thinks the city has vanished….”
ANMLY | 2017
The poem “Ruina” begins, “Ya’aburnee—may you bury me, says a lover in Arabic / Whereas not all Arabs speak the same language…”
“They Beat the Women Too” by Yasmeen Amro
Collateral | 2024
This poem begins, “They beat the women too. / Gas canisters pop and I never knew / my body could run before I give it the command to.”
Another Chicago Magazine | 2024
The poem “if I had fallen in love” begins, “if I had fallen in love that summer / in my little slip dresses and boots the color of blood, / lips a bite of strawberry and hair a wild story, / I might have been beautiful….”
“Learning to Make a Bed” by Zeina Azzam
Passager | 2021
This poem begins, “My mother taught me how to make a bed / when I was so young I could barely reach / the mattress while standing.”
“Hyphenated Howl” by Stevie Chedid
Tahoma Literary Review | 2024
This essay begins, “A professor of mine once paused on the topic of empathy. She told the classroom that her dog was truly mortified by thunderstorms, that it goes into such hysterics it could dive straight through a window.”
Review of Refaat Alareer’s If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose by Yasmin Desouki
Full Stop | 2025
This review begins, “Throughout her writing life, twentieth-century Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan gave voice to the steadfastness of Palestinian resistance in the face of displacement, land theft, murder, and occupation.”
Review of Egypt + 100: Stories from a Century after Tahrir by Yasmin Desouki
Full Stop | 2025
This review begins, “How do you imagine a future unencumbered by the heaviness of the present? Is it at all possible to envision a world completely different from the one we currently inhabit, or is the horizon of imagination defined by its limitations rather than its amorphous possibilities?”
“Al-Thakla—Arabic as the Original Mourner” by Abdelrahman ElGendy
The Markaz Review | 2024
This essay begins, “How do you hold your grief in a language that’s been its main perpetrator?”
“First Warm Sunday of the Year” by Safia Elhillo
World Literature Today | 2025
This poem begins, “it’s 1 a.m. in los angeles & i am trying / to finish this after putting off all day…”
“Tala (Ode to the Girl Palm)” by Majda Gama
West Trestle Review | 2020
This poem begins, “When I ate the fruit of the date palm delivered fresh / to me from an oasis in the empty quarter, admired / the gilt-twined bag the fruit lay in…”
ANMLY | 2024
The poem “Litany of I Miss You’s” begins, “i miss you the way polaris parkway mall has a grand piano at the base of the escalator in / the pink carpet pink wall department store.”
Collateral | 2024
This poem begins, “Sun’s stuck at dusk. / What are words when we screamed / for greater resistance eleven months ago?”
“Does My Extinction Turn You On?” by Tamim Khalanj
Another Chicago Magazine | 2025
This essay begins, “No one’s ever confused me as being white, I mean I’m mixed but there’s no chance.”
Rusted Radishes | 2024
The eleventh issue of Rusted Radishes features novel excerpts, poems, stories, and interviews by Thaer Husien, Mitch Rayes, Ghinwa Jawhari, Anna Simone Reumert, and more writers.
The Markaz Review | 2024
In this photo essay, “a young Palestinian American attempts to find a way out of her grief with a series of stark images.”
Dark Matter: Women Witnessing | 2015
The poem “My Grandmother Said” begins, “They just don’t know our stories, / (after being tear gassed by Israeli soldiers, / she held the cut onion, the hankie to her face)— / If they knew our stories…”
Cincinnati Review | 2023
This poem begins, “My mother used to lock herself in the wax room / Drip drip drip you’d hear / Run down the wooden furniture….”
Adi Magazine | 2023
The poem “New Neighbors” begins, “My short, pot-bellied uncle / takes me up to the roof of his house / at the top of the hilly village / to show me the far-reaching landscape.”
“Feast or Famine” by Glenn Shaheen
ANMLY | 2024
This poem begins, “heaven / Would any of us childhood pals have stuck together, that old tape, if not for distance?”
Two Poems by Priscilla Wathington
Adi Magazine | 2023
The poem “Doll Swing” begins, “Before I was myself, / I was her. / All the animals she stopped seeing. The angels / who came down to dress her…”
“The Citizenship Question, or, The Actors of Dearborn” by Ghassan Zeineddine
Georgia Review | 2020
This story begins, “Before arriving at Uncle Sam’s house on the corner of Yinger and Gould Streets, Youssef Bazzi had been canvassing the neighborhoods in East Dearborn for over a month, knocking on doors throughout the day and late into the night, despite the heat or rain.”
The Common | 2021
This special portfolio features nonfiction by Mona Kareem and poetry by Hala Alyan, Rasha Alduwaisan, Zeina Hashem Beck, and more.
