Mizna and the Loft present: Mideast in the Midwest 2006

June 8, 2006: Featuring novelist Jean Said Makdisi
Open Book
7:30 pm
1011 Washington Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN
$5 includes reception

What does it mean to be a "modern" woman in the Arab world? Set against a backdrop of political upheaval in Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, and the United States, Jean Said Makdisi's breathtaking memoir Teta, Mother, And Me: Three Generations of Arab Women contemplates this very question and lovingly chronicles the unsung private histories of three generations of women in her family.

Jean Said Makdisi was born in Jerusalem and studied in Cairo and the United States. She is the author of Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir, a New York Times Notable Book. Jean will be reading from and signing her new book, Teta, Mother, and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women. She lives in Beirut.

This event made possible by the support of the Loft Literary Center, and Dunn Bros. Coffee.

 

March 3, 2006: Featuring Elias Khoury
7:30 pm
Loft Literary Center
1011 Washington Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN
$5 includes reception

Born in Beirut in 1948, Elias Khoury is the author of eleven novels, four volumes of literary criticism, and three plays. The publication of his first novel On the Relations of the Circle (1975) entered him into the Beirut vanguard of modern Arabic literature, which was seeking to create new dimensions in the movement of modernism. Khoury's commitment to Palestinian human rights began when he visited a refugee camp in Jordan at age nineteen. Khoury has been an advocate ever since, devoting his energies to the Palestine Research Center in Beirut and speaking out in articles, essays, and through his fiction.

Khoury is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the cultural supplement of Beirut's daily newspaper, An-Nahar, and is a Global Distinguished professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. In 1998, he was awarded the Palestine Prize for Gate of the Sun, and in 2000, the novel was named Le Monde Diplomatique's Book of the Year. Elias Khoury is a public intellectual, and a cultural activist who plays a major role in contemporary Arabic culture and in the defense of the liberty of expression and democracy.

Also featuring readings by Ghada Kanafani (from Colorado), and local writers Deborah Tabbah del Castillo, and Mazen Halabi.

 

*All events take place at 7:30 p.m. at the Open Book Stage in partnership with the Loft Literary Center, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN.
The Mideast in the Midwest series is designed to develop and facilitate artists in the Arab, Muslim, and West Asian/North African community.