ESSAYS ON art, Literature, and writing craft
A Growing Inclination, on the habit of keeping a garden I learned from my father and grandfather, in World Literature Today.
The Sad Impermanence of Everything, on Telephone, by Percival Everett, the California Book Club’s May 2023 selection.
A Name for What’s Not There, on the California Book Club’s August 2022 selection by Rabih Alameddine.
Deconstructing Celia, in the May/June 2022 issue of World Literature Today.
Thoughts on Finishing, in The Northwest Review of Books, which sadly, is no longer online—but the full essay can be read here.
A Brief History of the Colloquial Title, at The Millions.
Eight Lessons in Plot from The Sound of Music, at LitStack.
A Brief Look at the British Travel Memoir, at LitStack.
short fiction
The Tayyare Apartments was honored by Ling Ma in Zoetrope: All-Story’s 2022 Short Fiction Competition. Read the opening here.
The Levantines appears in the spring 2019 themed issue of Nimrod International, Voices of the Middle East and North Africa.
An excerpt of An Amount of Discretion is here.
The Foreign Cinema first appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review as the winner of the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, judged by Paul Harding. Read an excerpt.
Report from an Independent Chapter of the Embroiderers’ Guild of America appeared in The Sycamore Review as a finalist for the Wabash Ficion Prize, judged by Tobias Wolff. Read an excerpt.
The Singularity of Things appeared in StoryQuarterly 38. An excerpt is here.
Self Portrait: Untitled was first published in Fish Stories: Collective IV, and in Art from Art: An Anthology of Fiction Inspired by Art (Modernist Press). An excerpt is here.
MEMOIR
Invisible History, a column that chronicles family stories of heritage and belonging and the complexities of my bicultural experience, at Catapult.
Arab Past, American Present: My Family’s Invisible History, can be read at the NYPL.
Are You Really Sisters? at Catapult, on family, cultural inheritance, and skin color.
Searching for Family History in My Grandmother’s Embroidery, on the family history that nearly slipped away, at Catapult.
Why My Father Could Not Embrace His Name, at Catapult, on passing and history that is, and isn’t, passed down.
Eldorado, on leaving home, building a house, and a missing father. Read an excerpt from the ZYZZYVA blog.
articles
The Wild Child: Attachment Theory and the Work of Francois Truffaut, at the MedHum Daily Dose blog.
Kind of Blue: Oakland 1995, at the museum of americana: a literary review.
A Hunger for Downton Abbey, at LitStack.
REVIEWS
You can read my weekly book recommendations here, at LitStack.
In the series at The Rumpus, The Last Book I Loved, I wrote about Orphans, essays by Charles D'Ambrosio.
On Little Failure: A Memoir, by Gary Shteyngart, at LitStack.
A recommendation for The Refugees: Stories, by Viet Thanh Nguyen, at LitStack.
INTERVIEWS WITH LAUREN
Interviews With Our 2016 BLR Prizewinners, at the Bellevue Literary Review.
An Interview With Lauren Alwan, by James Xiao, at The Sycamore Review.
Persistence and the Writer’s Road: Lauren Alwan’s An Amount of Discretion, at LitStack.
At The Common Breath’s Fiction Friday Q & A, I answered some questions about books, and wrote about my favorite short story.
INTERVIEWS BY LAUREN
Lauren's Q & A with WTAW Press Feature Series authors Lee Prusik and Jenny Wu, WTAW Press.
