Arab American Poets and Writers

Authors at the Library

A poetry reading for Arab American Heritage Month featuring Ruth Awad, Sara Abou Rashed, and Mandy Shunnarah.

Authors at the Library with Ruth Awad, Sara Abou Rashed and Mandy Shunnarah

Tuesday, April 22 | 6-7:30 p.m.
Northern Lights Branch | 4093 Cleveland Ave.

6 p.m. | Poetry Readings
6:45 p.m.| Panel Discussion
7:15 p.m. | Audience Q&A

In celebration of Arab American Heritage Month, local Arab American poets and writers Ruth Awad, Sara Abou Rashed, and Mandy Shunnarah will read from recent works and discuss their craft.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Ruth Awad is a Lebanese-American disabled poet, a 2021 NEA Poetry fellow, and the author of Outside the Joy (Third Man Books, 2024) and Set to Music a Wildfire (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Alongside Rachel Mennies, she is the co-editor of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs and Poetry (Sundress Publications, 2020). She is also the recipient of a 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her work is widely anthologized, most recently appearing in You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World edited by Ada Limón, and can be found in The Atlantic, AGNI, Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Believer, The New Republic, Pleiades, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and she lives and writes in Columbus, Ohio.

Originally from Palestine, but born and raised in Syria, Sara Abou Rashed moved with her family to Columbus, Ohio in 2013. Since then, she has keynoted at numerous conferences such as the National Convention of Teachers of English, the United States of Women, and Senator Sherrod Brown’s Women’s Leadership Summit. Sara's works appear in over 20 publications, including Poetry Magazine, Poetry Wales, The Kenyon Review, The LA Review and a language arts curriculum by McGraw-Hill. At sixteen, Sara delivered a TEDxTalk and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2019, she wrote and starred in her debut one-woman show titled A Map of Myself, in which she traced her family’s displacement journey and interrogated identity, belonging, immigration, and finding home. Sara holds a BA in International Studies and Creative Writing from Denison University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She lives in Columbus and is at work on her first collection of poetry.

Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is an Alabama-born, Appalachian and Palestinian-American writer who now calls Columbus, Ohio, home. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and others. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland, was published in July 2024 by Belt Publishing. Their second book, a poetry collection titled We Had Mansions, is forthcoming from Diode Editions in 2025. 

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