11 December 2013
The Jerusalem Fund
Washington, DC
“My Voice Sought the Wind”
with
Susan Abulhawa
Author / Poet
“I wrote poetry before I wrote anything else,” says Susan Abulhawa, esteemed Palestinian-American author and social activist, in the introduction to her first book of poems, My Voice Sought the Wind. This new work follows her highly acclaimed novel, Mornings in Jenin, which has been translated into 32 languages since it was published in 2010. My Voice Sought the Wind represents five years of poems on the themes of love, loss, identity, and family, brought to life through vivid observations and intimate personal reflections. The five sections of the book echo her personal journey, from the pain of separation from her homeland and her nostalgic memories of the past, through various phases of love and regret, through the experience of mortality, and finally to her reconciliation with the future and hope of new birth.
Susan Abulhawa currently lives in Pennsylvania. Her first novel, Mornings in Jenin (Bloomsbury 2010) was an international bestseller translated into 32 languages. She is a contributor to several anthologies, including Searching Jenin (Cune Press 2003), and Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home (Interlink 2013). Her political commentary has appeared in major press throughout the United States and international media outlets, including the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Al Jazeera, among others.
Abulhawa was born to refugees of the 1967 Six-Day War. She moved to the United States as a teenager, where she got a graduate degree in biomedical science from the University of South Carolina and established a successful career in medial science. In 2001, she founded Playgrounds for Palestine, an NGO that builds playgrounds in occupied territories and UN refugee camps to uphold the Right to Play for Palestinian children. She is a signatory to and active participant in the BDS campaign, which calls for an economic and cultural boycott of Israel.
