Meet the Speaker: Hannah Lillith Assadi

Hannah Lillith Assadi is the author of Sonora (Soho 2017), which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her second novel The Stars Are Not Yet Bells (Riverhead 2022) was named a New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022. Her third novel Paradiso 17, inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2026. She teaches fiction at the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute. In 2018, she was named a ‘5 under 35’ honoree by the National Book Foundation.