Poets Deema K. Shehabi, Zeina Hashem Beck & Priscilla Wathington - Poets! Every First Thursday

Poets Deema K. Shehabi, Zeina Hashem Beck & Priscilla Wathington - Poets! Every First Thursday

Deema K. Shehabi is a Palestinian-American poet, writer, and editor. She’s the author of Thirteen Departures from the Moon and co-editor with Beau Beausoleil of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, for which she received a Northern California Book Award. She’s also co-author of Diaspo/Renga (republished as Water to Water in Fall 2025) with Marilyn Hacker and winner of the Nazim Hikmet poetry competition in 2018. Deema’s work has also appeared in Academy of American Poets, Prairie Schooner, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry London, Kenyon Review,The Massachusetts Review, and in anthologies including Ask the Night for a Dream: New Palestinian Writing from the Diaspora. Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her collection of 40 palindromic sonnets, titled This Was Supposed to Be About Beauty, is forthcoming from Penguin Poets in Spring 2027. She’s the winner of the 2023 Arab American Book Award for Poetry for O, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Literary Hub and The New York Public Library. She’s also the author of Louder than Hearts and To Live in Autumn, as well as the chapbooks 3arabi Song and There Was and How Much There Was. Her work has appeared in LARB, Lithub, The Nation, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. She’s the co-editor, with Hala Alyan, of the anthology We Call to the Eye and the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Descent. She’s the co-creator and co-host, with poet Farah Chamma, of Maqsouda, a podcast in Arabic about Arabic poetry. Zeina currently resides in California. Priscilla Wathington is a Palestinian American poet/editor and the author of the chapbook, Paper and Stick (Tram Editions/2021). Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Four Way Review, Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She was the Sam Mazza Writer in Residence at San Francisco State University’s Poetry Center in 2024 and a Tin House Winter Workshop Scholar in 2025. Wathington sits on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College.