KSW Presents Sarah Aziza with Sam Sax and Zeina Hashem Beck

Book Release Celebration “The Hollow Half”
Sarah Aziza with Sam Sax and Zeina Hashem Beck
May 17th | 6-8pm
Arc Gallery & Studios
1246 Folsom St. SF, CA
No cover

ABOUT “THE HOLLOW HALF”: “A brush with death. An ancestral haunting. A century of family secrets. Sarah Aziza’s searing, genre-bending memoir traces three generations of diasporic Palestinians from Gaza to the Midwest to New York City—and back”

Join us on May 17th as we welcome author, Sarah Aziza, who will be reading alongside local poets, Sam Sax and Zeina Hashem Beck

Sarah Aziza

SARAH AZIZA is a Palestinian American writer, translator, and artist with roots in ‘Ibdis and Deir al-Balah, Gaza. The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship and numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, she has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, South Africa, the West Bank, and the United States. Her award-winning journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, Lux, The Washington Post, The Intercept, The Rumpus, NPR, The Margins, and The Nation, among other publications.

Sam Sax

Sam Sax is the author of the novel, Yr Dead, longlisted for The National Book Award and the poetry collection PIG named one of the best books of 2023 by Vulture and Electric Lit. They're also the author of Madness, Winner of the National Poetry Series, and Bury It, Winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. They live in Oakland and are a lecturer in an interdisciplinary arts program at Stanford University.  

Zeina Hashem Beck

Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her collection of 40 palindromic sonnets, titled This Was Supposed to Be About Beauty, is forthcoming from Penguin Poets in Spring 2027. She’s the winner of the 2023 Arab American Book Award for Poetry for O, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Literary Hub and The New York Public Library. She’s also the author of Louder than Hearts and To Live in Autumn, as well as the chapbooks 3arabi Song and There Was and How Much There Was. Her work has appeared in LARB, Lithub, The Nation, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. She’s the co-editor, with Hala Alyan, of the anthology We Call to the Eye and the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Descent. She’s the co-creator and co-host, with poet Farah Chamma, of Maqsouda, a podcast in Arabic about Arabic poetry. Zeina currently resides in California.