Arab American Book Award Winners (Adult)

"Love Across Borders takes readers through contentious frontiers around the world to reveal the widespread prejudicial laws intent on dividing us. Anna Lekas Miller tells her own gripping story of meeting Salem Rizk in Istanbul, where they were reporting on the Syrian civil war. But when Turkey started cracking down on refugees, Salem, who is Syrian, wasn't allowed to stay there, nor could he safely return to Syria. In this look at the global immigration...

"The Weight of Ghosts is a circling of grief following the death of the author's older son when he was twenty-one, a horror that was compounded by her younger son's drug use, the country's slow eruption as it dealt with its own brokenness, and reckoning the author had to do regarding her own story. The Weight of Ghosts is a lyrical reclaiming and an insistence by the author that she own the rights to her story, which is American flavored with an unreleasing...

In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, an Egyptian American woman and a man from the village of Shobrakheit meet at a café in Cairo. He was a photographer of the revolution, but now finds himself unemployed and addicted to cocaine, living in a rooftop shack. She is a nostalgic daughter of immigrants "returning" to a country she's never been to before, teaching English and living in a light-filled flat with balconies on all sides. They fall in love...

"From a "brilliant, absolutely essential voice" whose "poems feel like whole worlds" (Naomi Shihab Nye), a poetry collection considering the body physical, the body politic, and the body sacred. Zeina Hashem Beck writes at the intersection of the divine and the profane, where she crafts elegant, candid poems that simultaneously exude a boundless curiosity and a deep knowingness. Formally electrifying-from lyrics and triptychs to ghazals and Zeina's...

"The moving, eye-opening memoir of an innocent man detained at Gauntánamo Bay for 15 years: a story of humanity in the unlikeliest of places and an unprecedented look at life at Gauntánamo on the eve of its 20th anniversary"-- Provided by publisher. "At the age of 18, Mansoor Adayfi left his home in Yemen for a cultural mission to Afghanistan. He never returned. Kidnapped by warlords and then sold to the US after 9/11, he was disappeared to Guantánamo...

"From the internationally bestselling author of the "terrifically affecting" (The Philadelphia Inquirer) Mornings in Jenin, a sweeping and lyrical novel that follows a young Palestinian refugee as she slowly becomes radicalized while searching for a better life for her family throughout the Middle East."-- Provided by publisher.

"The award-winning stories in Dima Alzayat's collection are luminous and tender, whether dealing with a woman performing burial rites for her brother in "Ghusl," or a great-aunt struggling to explain cultural identity to her niece in "Once We Were Syrians."Alzayat's stories are rich and relatable, chronicling a sense of displacement through everyday scenarios. There is the intern in pre-#MeToo Hollywood of "Only Those Who Struggle Succeed," the New...

"In Invasive species, Marwa Helal's searing politically charged poems touch on our collective humanity and build new pathways for empathy, etching themselves into memory. This work centers on urgent themes in our cultural landscape, creating space for unseen victims of discriminatory foreign (read: immigration) policy: migrants, refugees--the displaced. Helal transfers lived experiences of dislocation and relocation onto the reader by obscuring borders...

"An exquisite and humane collection set to leave its mark on American poetics of the body and the body politic. In Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance, Fady Joudah has written love poems to the lovely and unlovely, the loved and unloved. Here he celebrates moments of delight and awe with his wife, his mentors, his friends, and the beauty of the natural world. Yet he also finds tenderness for the other, the dead, and the disappeared, bringing together...