Modern Arab Literature and The Western Audience (December 2021)

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet, writer, academic and translator.  She will share an examination of perceived Arab culture to the Western audience, including the roles of women through modern Arab Literature. The learner should understand the changing dynamics of assumed Arab cultural customs. 

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet, essayist, translator, and literary scholar, and Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is the author of five books of Arabic poetry, selections from which have been translated into numerous languages. In English translation, her poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, Paris Review, The Nation, American Poetry Review, among others. A selection of Mersal’s poetry, entitled These Are Not Oranges, My Love, translated by the poet Khaled Mattawa, was published in 2008 (Sheep Meadow Press- NYC). Another selection is forthcoming in Spring 2022 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, translated by Robyn Creswell. Her most recent publications include and Kayfa Talta’im: ‘An al-Umuma wa Ashbahiha (Kayfa Ta and Mophradat, 2017), translated into English by Robin Moger as How to Mend: Motherhood and its Ghosts (Kayfa Ta and Sternberg Press, 2018.  Fi Athar Enayat al- Zayyat  (In the Footsteps of of Enayat al-Zayyat, 2019) has been translated into French by Richard Jacquemond, as Sur les traces d’Enayat Zayyat, Actes Sud. The book was awarded the prestigious Shaykh Zayed award for literature in 2021.