A MAP IS ONLY ONE STORY is included in TIME's list of 11 New Books You Should Read in February. Catapult’s first-ever published anthology of essays features twenty writers on migration, family, and what it is to live between cultures—and I'm thrilled to be included! More details here.
A Map is Only One Story out Feb. 11!
I’m thrilled to have an essay included in this beautiful anthology from Catapult Books, edited by Nicole Chung and Mensah Demary. The collection launches Feb. 11, but you can pre-order online now from Catapult, or your favorite indie bookseller.
From the publisher:
In the first published anthology of writing from Catapult magazine, twenty writers share stories of migration, family, the search for home and belonging, and what it means to exist between languages and cultures
From rediscovering an ancestral village in China to experiencing the realities of American life as a Nigerian, the search for belonging crosses borders and generations. Selected from the archives of Catapult magazine, the essays in A Map Is Only One Story highlight the human side of immigration policies and polarized rhetoric, as twenty writers share provocative personal stories of existing between languages and cultures.
My new column at Catapult Magazine
I’m thrilled to have the chance to share some of my family stories in a new column up at Catapult Magazine, Invisible History. The first installment, “Are You Really Sisters? On Identity and Sisterhood Within a Multicultural Family,” is up today. I love the artwork by Catapult’s contributing illustrator, Sirin Thada.
Q & A at The Common Breath
Thank you to The Common Breath for the chance to share this list of memorable books (and a story that decades after first reading it, I'm still thinking about), in Brian Hamill's #FictionFriday series.
2019 Reads
The end-of-year/new year is the best time to take stock of my reading in 2019—and for planning the coming year’s list. Story collections, memoir, novels, essays, and nonfiction for research make up 2019’s list, and reviews of some can be found, or are forthcoming, over at Litstack—likewise my TBR list for 2020 (which includes Hilary Mantel’s newest installment of the Thomas Cromwell series, The Mirror & The Light, and Garth Greenwell’s follow-up to his beloved debut, What Belongs to You, Cleanness).
Save the date!
If you’re headed to San Antonio for #AWP2020, the yearly conference of writers and educators (which attracts over 12,000 attendees and is widely considered the largest literary gathering in the US), we hope you’ll put our panel on your dance card. “High Style and Misdemeanors: The Virtues and Vices of Elevated Prose,” will take place Thursday, March 5, featuring Anita Felicelli (LOVE SONGS FOR A LOST CONTINENT, CHIMERICA), Lillian Howan (THE CHARM BUYERS), Aatif Rashid (PORTRAIT OF SEBASTIAN KHAN ), and Olga Zilberbourg (LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES), and me, in a discussion of the highs, and lows, of literary high style.
See you in San Antonio for AWP 2020
Great news arrived this week with the acceptance of a panel by the AWP conference committee. I’ll be moderating the panel “High Style and Misdemeanors: The Virtues and Vices of Elevated Prose,” with Anita Felicelli, Olga Zilberbourg, Lillian Howan and Aatif Rashid. Here’s the panel description:
The hallmarks of high style—elevated voice, obsession with the pictorial, self-consciousness, and poetic devices—are rooted in Flaubert and European realism. Can writers whose work concerns immigration and displacement embrace a stylistic approach that has historically been disengaged and apolitical? Authors of fiction that centers on immigration, intergenerational stories, and belonging read their work and discuss the intersection of elevated prose and socially and politically engaged work.
We’re looking forward to the discussion, sharing our thoughts on style, and reading from our work and work by our favorite prose stylists. Date and time TBA!
A New Anthology from Catapult
I’m thrilled to have an essay included in this new anthology from Catapult, A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home, which includes selections from Catapult Magazine’s outstanding Migration series.
From the publisher: “In the first published anthology of writing from Catapult magazine, twenty writers share stories of migration, family, the search for home and belonging, and what it means to exist between languages and cultures.”
The anthology appears in February, 2020, but you can pre-order a copy, and learn more, here.
Out now: Nimrod International's new MENA-themed issue.
Nimrod’s Voices of the Middle East and North Africa is out now, and my story “The Levantines” is included. The story is set in Los Angeles in 1950, and is based on a period of my family’s history, when my paternal grandfather, who with my grandmother emigrated to New York early in the 20th century, retired from the Atlantic Avenue bakery he founded with his brothers and moved the family to southern California. In “The Levantines,” I’ve imagined what those first weeks were like, especially for the character of Sofia, who is based on my grandmother, and whose life was defined by a series of painful departures and dislocations.
The editors were kind enough to include a photograph taken outside my grandfather’s bakery in Brooklyin, taken by my father around 1946
You can purchase an issue here.
Forthcoming from Nimrod International
I’m thrilled and honored to have my story, “The Levantines,” forthcoming in Nimrod International Journal's Voices of the Middle East and North Africa, featuring writers currently living in this region, writers from the region currently living abroad, and writers of Middle Eastern and North African heritage. That last category is where I come in—my paternal grandparents immigrated to the US after they married in 1921. My grandfather, Muneer Alwan was born in Damascus in 1889, and my grandmother, Fausya Zemberekci Alwan, was born in then-Constantinople in 1906. As third generation and culturally mixed, I see the stories of my grandparents’ generation, the second generation of my parents, and my own, as a kind of larger story of what it feels like to carry that past history, even as it’s still informing identity. “The Levantines,” is the title story of my in-progress story collection. Nimrod’s special issue appears this spring.
Zemberekci family photographed in then-Constantinople, about 1919. My grandmother, at age 13, is pictured standing third from left.