Doors open at 11:30am | Event starts at 12pm

Join Word Up for a reading of Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, the award-winning debut collection by Palestinian poet and founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza Mosab Abu Toha. The night will commence with a reading by American writer and Abu Toha friend Richard Hoffman, followed by community participation to read from Abu Toha’s work and your own on Gaza/Palestine.

Mosab Abu Toha will join for the Q & A via Zoom from Cairo! The on-site discussant will be Hany Massoud, longtime producer for Democracy Now and founder of the Inwood Arabic Class.

This is a fundraiser for Middle East Children’s Alliance – Meca for Peace, a nonprofit organization working for the rights and the well-being of children in the Middle East. MECA supports dozens of community projects for Palestinian children and refugees.

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket. Please register in advance.

In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees for this event must wear a mask inside.

Word Up Community Bookshop is located at 2113 Amsterdam Ave. (& 165th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 168th St and the A/C train to 163rd or 168th  St.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, scholar, and librarian who was born in Gaza and has spent his life there. He is the founder of the Edward Said Library, Gaza’s first English-language library. Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza is his debut book of poems. The collection won an American Book Award, a 2022 Palestine Book Award and was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, as well as the 2022 Walcott Poetry Prize.In 2019-2020, Abu Toha was a Visiting Poet in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.Abu Toha is a columnist for Arrowsmith Press, and his writings from Gaza have also appeared in The Nation and Literary Hub. His poems have been published in Poetry, The Nation, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, and the New York Review of Books, among others.

Richard Hoffman is the author of the memoirs Half the House and Love & Fury; the poetry collections, Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, winner of the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the 2008 Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club; Emblem; Noon until Night, winner of the 2018 Massachusetts Book Award for Poetry. He is also author of the essay collection Remembering the Alchemists. A fiction writer as well, his Interference & Other Stories was published in 2009. A former Chair of PEN New England, he is Emeritus Writer in Residence at Emerson College.

Hany Massoud is the proud father of Ismael, Sofian, Zakariah, Qasim and Aminah and husband to Ayesha. He is the first US-born member of his family after his parents immigrated from Egypt. He has been with Democracy Now! since 2007 and has covered international stories such as the global climate catastrophe, the 2011 uprising in Egypt, the Gaza Flotilla, and the return of exiled presidents Aristide (Haiti) and Zelaya (Honduras). He received an Emmy for his work in the HBO documentary, In Tahrir Square: 18 Days of Egypt’s Unfinished Revolution. Locally, he has also been on the ground with the DN! team covering the Black Lives Matter movement, the fight for migrant rights at the US border, and the stripping of civil liberties spawned from the “War on Terror.” Prior to Democracy Now!, Hany was the Morning Chief Editor at KHOU/CBS in Houston and worked as International TV Bureau Liaison out of the United Nations. He develops programs that converge youth development, civic engagement and media literacy for an after school program he co-founded with his wife called Justice By the Pen.