Haunting as Inheritance

A conversation about belonging, place, and displacement that will take us on a tour de force from Cairo to the Sonoran Desert to the gritty streets of New York City. Join us on Tuesday, February 18, 2025, from 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. ET.

Speakers:
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.

Noor Naga is an Alexandrian writer who was born in Philadelphia, raised in Dubai, and studied in Toronto. Her verse-novel Washes, Prays was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2020 and 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, 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 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her work has been published in Granta, LitHub, Poetry, BOMB, The Walrus, The Common, The Offing, and more. 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.

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For more information visit the event website.