EVENTS
August 8, 2025
7:00pm (ET)
Politics & Prose
5015 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington, DC 20008
Badra will be in conversation with Heba F. El-Shazli, an Egyptian American and an avid lover and reader of literature from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. She is an associate professor of political science (retired as of June 2025) at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. Heba taught courses on governments and politics of the Middle East and North Africa, Islam and politics, international relations, Israel and Palestine, and the role of civil society and social movements in democratization. She has been teaching at Politics & Prose bookstore since 2013 and she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. During the 2023-24 academic year, she was a visiting academic at St Antony’s College, Oxford University. Heba recently (February - April 2025) taught a series of classes at Politics and Prose about the Kurds and their literature in an attempt to better understand the Kurdish people: their culture, history, society and politics.
Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for an in-store event with Holly Mason Badra, Hajjar Baban, and Pınar Banu Yaşar to honor the release of Sleeping in the Courtyard: Contemporary Kurdish Writers in Diaspora.
Hajjar Baban is a Pakistan-born Afghan Kurdish poet. She has won a Pushcart Prize and has poems in West Branch Mag, The Hopkins Review, and Poetry Daily. Baban is a poetry reader for Muzzle Magazine and a co-founder of the Kurdish Poets Collective.
Pınar Banu Yaşar is an educator, poet, and pole dancer. A Best of the Net Nominee, a Poetry Online Launch Prize Finalist, and a Storm Cellar Quarterly Flash Fiction finalist, Yaşar has been published in print and online. Most recently their work can be found in the Futurities Issue of Mizna as well as Sleeping In The Courtyard, an anthology of Kurdish women and nonbinary writers from University of Arkansas Press. Yaşar has received continued support from Tin House Summer Writers Workshop as well as Kenyon Review Writers Workshop since 2019.
The George Mason University Kurdish Student Organization will host a book launch party to celebrate the release of Sleeping in the Courtyard. The event will include a reading by one of the book’s contributors, Zhawen Shali.
Zhawen Shali is a Kurdish poet and journalist. She was born in 1986 in the city of Suleimani in Southern Kurdistan. She graduated from Sulemani Polytechnic University and worked as a journalist for several Kurdish outlets. She published her first book, The Autumn of My Life, in 2008 (Sulaimani Pen House). Her second book, Neither You Nor Rain Stayed, was published in 2013 by the Kurdish Writer’s Union in Erbil. She has won several national and international prizes in literature. Her poems have been translated into English and published in Circumference Magazine and included in the anthology Sleeping in the Courtyard: Contemporary Kurdish Poets in Diaspora. She currently lives in the US.
Details coming soon
Co-sponsored by The Alan Cheuse International Writers Center, The Global South Hub, and the Women and Gender Studies Program at GMU. In celebrating the publication of Sleeping in the Courtyard, join us for a conversation with authors Holly Mason Badra and Meryem Uzumcu about the collection’s process, content, and impact. They will explore topics related to erasure, gender, literary visibility, and more.
Coffee/tea provided. There will be a Q&A at the end. The event is hybrid (with our authors appearing in person), with the option to attend in person or on zoom (link emailed upon registration). Attendees will receive a discount code from the press to order the book if they choose.
Meryem Rabia Uzumcu is a women's, gender, and sexuality studies PhD candidate at Rutgers University, where she is completing her dissertation on the state nexus of disability, race, and sexual violence in Diyarbekir. Her poems and audio story, "Family Rashomon," has been featured in Jasur Mag and also in the forthcoming anthology of Kurdish writers in diaspora with the University of Arkansas Press. Partaking in Holly Mason Badra's project, Sleeping in the Courtyard has in many ways reiterated her commitments to shared oral histories through storytelling from her maternal family's homesite of Diyarbekir/Amed, a city critically situated in Kurdish anti-assimilation and anti-colonial struggle.
August 23, 2025
7:00pm (ET)
Brookline Booksmith
279 Harvard Street
Coolidge Corner
Brookline, MA 02446
September 6, 2025
6:00pm (ET)
Book Launch Party Hosted by the GMU Kurdish Student Organization
George Mason University Bistro Ground Floor of the Johnson Center Paid Parking in Mason Pond Parking Deck 4400 University Drive Fairfax VA 22030
September 9, 2025
7:00pm (ET)
Montgomery County Middle Eastern American Advisory Group, Montgomery County Library, Virtual
September 12, 2025
12:00pm-1:00pm (ET)
George Mason University Center for Humanities Research
Hybrid Event: Join Online or In Person
Horizon Hall 6325 Paid Parking in Mason Pond Parking Deck 4400 University Drive Fairfax VA 22030
October 11, 2025
10:30-11:45 (CDT)
RAWIFest 2025
Anthologies as Community Spaces: Anthology Editors in Conversation
University of Houston Honors College
Anthologies as Community Spaces: Anthology Editors in Conversation
With Susan Muaddi Darraj, Holly Mason Badra, Aryan Omar Hassan, Andrea Abi-Karam, and Lisa Suhair Majaj. Join the editors of Ask the Night for a Dream, Sleeping in the Courtyard, Henar Press, We Want It All, Etel Adnan: Critical Essays, and more, in a discussion on the potential of anthologies in community building.