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Rebuilding Palestinian Identity with The Inner Loop

Rebuilding Palestinian Identity: Kramers and the Inner Loop welcome poet Lenna Jawdat and short story writer Hasan Dudar for a talk exploring what Palestinians have lost and how they can rebuild. Our moderator for the night is Zeina Azzam. Lenna Jawdat’s 70,000 is an embodied meditation on cultural displacement, memory, and resilience, a fragmented yet powerful archive—blending poetry, memoir, maps, documents, and collage. Hasan Dudar’s Carryout follows a Palestinian family facing bigotry (pre- and post-9/11), financial ruin, and terminal illness, finding themselves on life’s outskirts, yet attempting to build something new. Both collections explore what these Palestinians have lost and what it might take to rebuild. Lenna Jawdat is a poet, writer, and psychotherapist of Palestinian and Iraqi descent. Her writing, which explores trauma, identity and resilience, has appeared in journals such as Poet Lore , The Margins , Passenger's Journal, Rogue Agent, among others, and in the 2025 Haymarket Anthology Heaven Looks Like Us . She was a 2021 Best of the Net nominee for her poem "Ode to the Psoas," a 2022 Sundress Academy for the Arts summer resident, and has attended Tin House Workshop for poetry and creative nonfiction. She is also co-organizer of the poetry vigil series In Water and Light. Lenna received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in May 2024. She lives in DC with her partner and two cats. Hasan Dudar is from Toledo, Ohio, and lives in Washington, DC. Carryout is his first book of fiction. Zeina Azzam is a Palestinian American poet, writer, editor, and community activist. She was the poet laureate of Alexandria, Virginia, for 2022-25. Zeina’s publications include Some Things Never Leave You , Bayna Bayna In-Between , Poems for Alexandria , and poems in literary journals and anthologies. Her professional career focused on education and Middle East affairs, with 27 years at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. She serves as poetry editor for We Are Not Numbers, a writing program for young adults in Gaza, and holds an M.A. in Arabic literature from Georgetown. www.zeinaazzam.com

September 29 · 7 PM · Kramers

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