Zaina Arafat
“Being in between cultures and identities can be alienating, as you often feel you belong to neither of the two. At the same time, it gives you a unique perspective, the view from the in-between, and allows you to bring your encounters and observations from one realm to the other, enriching your experience in each.”
“A beautiful and thoroughly honest meditation on home as both journey and destination. Amidst a decades-long campaign of erasure, amidst virulent racism and repression, amidst a genocide, Arafat interrogates what it means to be rooted to Palestinian and American identities, memories, ways of being in the world. Every word, every detail of time and place, rings true, and having read these precise, vulnerable and deeply thought-through essays, one is left with the sense that belonging is not some binary state, but rather an ongoing, ever-expansive act.”
“[An] outstanding portrait-in-essays of the Palestinian diaspora. Throughout, she explores her own psyche, detailing minute reactions and feelings that emerge from her daily life, relationships, and personal milestones, but that also intertwine in unexpected ways with the maddening reality of living in a world that refuses to acknowledge the daily crimes perpetrated against her people. Clarifying and powerful, this probes at the wounded hearts of Palestinians in exile.”
“My favorite book of the year.”
“At once complicated and engaging, this is the kind of debut novel that announces the arrival of a powerful new author who, besides writing beautifully, has a lot to say.”
“[A] provocative and seductive debut . . . Novels like these don’t exist enough.”
Zaina Arafat is an LGBTQ Arab-American fiction and nonfiction writer. She is the author of the novel, You Exist Too Much (Catapult, 2020), which won a 2021 Lambda Literary Award and was named Roxane Gay's favorite book of 2020. Her next book is Our Arab: On Longing, Belonging, and Hope, a poignant, moving essay collection on the longing and hope of living in diaspora and what it means to be Palestinian today. It will be published by Little, Brown in October 2026. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Granta, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harper's Bazaar, BuzzFeed, VICE, Guernica, Literary Hub and NPR. In recognition of her work, she was awarded the Arab Women/Migrants from the Middle East fellowship at Jack Jones Literary Arts and named a Champion of Pride by The Advocate.
As an editor, she curated a portfolio of prose and poetry in response to the travel ban, as well as a Q & A series with Muslim writers forThe Margins. She also served as the managing editor of VinePair, the largest online publication on wine news and culture, and as the culture editor for Xtra Magazine, an LGBTQ+-focused publication.
In an interview, Arafat was asked about things white people don’t understand about being a queer person of color: “I think it could be easy for a white reader to think, “What’s the big deal about being queer in 2020?” But it still is a big deal to many people of color. It can also be difficult for some communities to accept queerness because they see it as a further way of being marginalized, and out of love and concern they don’t want members within their community to be more marginalized than they already are.”
Arafat teaches creative writing at Barnard College. She has also taught at the University of Iowa, The School of the New York Times, the International Writing Program and Sackett Street Writers, as well as abroad in Jordan, Egypt and Eritrea, where she taught creative writing as part of a U.S. State Department/International Writing Program delegation. She has also led workshops for dreamers and DACA recipients through the Writer's Guild Initiative. She holds an M.F.A. from Iowa and an M.A. from Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn and is currently at work on a collection of essays.
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(c) Carleen Coulter
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