Samar, a SWANA and friends literary series

KSW is excited to host the fourth Samar Reading Series on Friday, July 25 at 7 PM with featured readers Raed Rafei, Zêdan Xelef, and Ebti.

Bios:

Raed Rafei is a Lebanese filmmaker, scholar, educator and multimedia journalist. He is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He has worked as a Middle East reporter, director, and producer for media outlets like Al-Jazeera, and CNN. Rafei’s independent films were screened at international film festivals and received several awards. He is the author of two book chapters: “On the Natural, the Obscure and Anal Tests,” in Pink Labor on Golden Streets (2015), and “Queer Revolution and the Reawakening of the Belly Dancer” in Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa (2024). His essays have been published in the Los Angeles Times, Kohl, Mizna and e-flux journal.

Zêdan Xelef is a polylingual poet, translator, organizer, and archivist. They grew up in the Yazidi community of Shingal Mountains where they herded four goats with three other cousins. They are the co-creator of Tew Tew, an oral history and oral traditions archive with a mission to conserve the endangered Yazidi oral traditions in response to the Yazidi genocide. Their work has been supported by Kashkul (AUIS), the Piper Center for Creative Writing, and the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands.

Ebti is a multidisciplinary artist, a photographer, and a translator living between Cairo and San Francisco. She has an MA in translation and intercultural studies from Johannes Gutenberg Universitat, Mainz, and an MFA in Fine Art from California College of the Arts. Ebti is part of “Right window” collective, “Off Hours” collective, and is sitting on the curatorial council at “Southern Exposure Gallery” in San Francisco. Her work was shown in galleries around the US and Egypt. She currently teaches visual arts and photography at Performing Arts Workshop in San Francisco, Bay Area.