Samer Abu Hawwash and Huda Fakhreddine

Samer Abu Hawwash is a Palestinian writer and translator. He was born in Lebanon to a Palestinian refugee family. He has published ten volumes of poetry, starting with his debut collection Life is Printed in New York (1997). He is also a prolific translator of English-language fiction and non-fiction. Among his notable translations are works by Charles Bukowski, Langston Hughes, Jack Kerouac, Yann Martel, Hanif Kureishi, Denis Johnson and Marilynne Robinson.

Huda Fakhreddine is a writer and translator. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge, 2023). Her book of creative nonfiction titled Zaman saghir taht shams thaniya (A Small Time Under a Different Sun) was published by Dar al-Nahda, Beirut in 2019. She is the co-translator of Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA editions, 2017), The Sky That Denied Me (University of Texas Press, 2020), Come Take a Gentle Stab (Seagull Books, 2021), and the translator of The Universe, All at Once (Seagull Books, forthcoming). Her translations of Arabic poems have appeared in World Literature Today, Protean Magazine, Mizna, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Asymptote among others. She is associate professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania.