Anthology Spotlight: El Ghourabaa: A Queer And Trans Collection of Oddities
Event Details
Seeking uncanny, fun, experimental, creepy, sarcastic, playful, vulgar, inventive, sexual, weird, sweet, and evocative works, editors Samia Marshy and Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch set out
Event Details
Seeking uncanny, fun, experimental, creepy, sarcastic, playful, vulgar, inventive, sexual, weird, sweet, and evocative works, editors Samia Marshy and Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch set out to collect Arab and Arabophone queer writing. The result is an anthology brimming with gems by emerging and established writers and an homage to the lineages and complexities of queer Arab life. Multi-genre, multi-generational, and global, El Ghourabaa is an enigma, a delight, and a contribution to an ongoing conversation and creative outpouring. Editors Samia and Eli Tareq will be joined by contributors Trish Salah and Hoda Adra to discuss the process of creating the anthology, and what it means to celebrate queer Arab life in this collective moment in time.
Speakers for this event
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Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch
Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch
Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is an mixed-Arab a writer living in Tio’tia:ke. Their book, knot body, was published by Metatron Press in 2020, and their second book, The Good Arabs, published by Metonymy Press in 2021, was granted the honorary mention for poetry by the Arab American Book Awards and won the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. Their translation of Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay’s La fille d’elle-même was published April 2023. With co-editor Samia Marshy, they edited El Ghourabaa, an anthology of queer and trans writing by Arab and Arabophone writers, published June 2024.
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Hoda Adra
Hoda Adra
Hoda Adra is a poet and translator who was born in Lebanon and grew up in Saudi Arabia until age 17, before moving to Montreal in 2002. Her writing explores gender apartheid, aborted oral histories, and the politics of marginalization of female bodies and movements. Hoda’s participations include The Banff Spoken Word Programme and the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. In 2021, her translations of Palestinian oral history archives in Voices of the Nakba (Pluto Press) received the PEN Translates Award. Her storytelling solo “L’histoire de comment je me suis séparée en deux” premieres in november at Théâtre Prospero.
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Samia Marshy
Samia Marshy
Samia Marshy is a full-time reader and part-time writer located in Tio’tià:ke (Montreal, QC). She has been a practising massage therapist since 2015 and cares deeply about bodies, access to care, and consent in bodywork. She co-wrote “The Hands That Planted Them” with Lee Lai, published in Metal Hurlant, and was an editor for The Philistine by Leila Marshy.
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Trish Salah
Trish Salah
Born in Halifax / Kjipuktuk in Mi’kma’ki, Trish Salah is a writer of mixed Arab-Irish heritage. She is the author of the Lambda Award-winning poetry collection, Wanting in Arabic and of Lyric Sexology Vol. 1, and co-editor of a special issues of TSQ, on trans cultural production, and Arc Poetry Magazine, spotlighting trans, non-binary and Two Spirit writers. An associate professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, she edits the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry. She lives in T’karonto.
Books
El Ghourabaa
A Queer and Trans Collection of Oddities
AuthorEli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch (ed.), Samia Marshy (ed.), Trish Salah
