Haunting as Inheritance

Experience the Event

Presented by Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance

How does language haunt the displaced? Join Noor Naga, author of If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, and Hannah Lillith Assadi, author of Sonora, as they explore “linguistic slippage” and the “untranslatability of the self.” From post-revolutionary Cairo to the Arizona desert, discover how spectral forces beneath the English language shape modern identity. Listen in for an essential interrogation of life in the “in-between” spaces.

This event is sponsored by Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Creative Writing Program, Department of English, Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, The Graduate School, Department of American Studies, Institute for Social Concerns, Teaching Beyond the Classroom Grants, The Brookline Booksmith Transnational Literature Series and the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good/Henkels Grant.

Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance is a research collective, conversation series, and digital archive dedicated to contemporary literature shaped by exile, transnational migration, and human rights violations. The series brings Southwest and Southeast Asian and North African writers and artists into sustained dialogue with American writers and scholars to imagine new modes of literary production across borders and cultivate intersectional solidarities. The series was developed as a global public humanities project in partnership with institutes and initiatives both within and beyond the University of Notre Dame, and was founded by author and Dorothy G. Griffin College Professor of English at Notre Dame, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi in 2020.

For more information visit the event website.

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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.

Meet the Speaker: Noor Naga

Noor Naga is an Alexandrian writer who was born in Philadelphia, raised in Dubai and studied in Toronto. In 2017, she won the Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry and in 2019 she won both the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award and the DISQUIET Fiction Prize. Her verse-novel Washes, Prays was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2020. Set in Toronto, this genre-bending work follows an immigrant woman’s romantic relationship with a married man and her ensuing crisis of faith. It won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, as well as the Arab American Book Award, and was listed in the Best Canadian Poetry of 2020 by CBC.

Set in Cairo in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, Naga’s debut novel, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, is a dark romance examining the gaps in North American identity politics, especially when exported overseas. It won the Graywolf Press Africa Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and has been shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. It was released in April 2022 to rave reviews from Kirkus, Chicago Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, the CBC, and The New York Times, which called it an “exhilarating debut.” Since then it has been translated into Italian, French and Turkish, with Arabic, Norwegian and Brazilian Portuguese on the way.

Naga divides her time between Cairo and Toronto where she teaches. She is represented by Nicole Aragi. Her first memoir, Third Person, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in Fall 2027.