Current Projects
Current Project:
WHERE DO YOU LIVE
by Jennifer Jean and Hanaa Ahmad Jabr
Book Launch: May 10th, 2025
A profound gesture toward peace and healing by women who believe in the enduring power of open-hearted dialogue
WITH JENNIFER JEAN, Dr. HANAA AHMAD JABR and WADAQ QAIS hosted by Arrowsmith Press
About the book
Where Do You Live? أين تعيش؟ is a bilingual, collaborative collection of “poem responses” in Arabic and English, written and co-translated by Iraqi poet Dr. Hanaa Ahmad and American poet Jennifer Jean—with the aid of Iraqi translators Tamara Al- Attiya and Wadaq Qais. In this intensely intimate book, poet talks to poet, and poem talks to poem. The process of the book's creation is a profound gesture towards peace and healing by women who believe in the enduring power of open-hearted dialogue. And, the “where” in question isn’t limited to a physical space but to the places minds and souls linger or reside.
Where Do You Live? أين تعيش؟ is both the title and the driving question at the heart of this lovely epistolary poetic dialogue between two poets scarred by the fire of war. Poem by poem, these two poets find themselves reaching each other—touching across tongues—in this sisterhood of poems, despite the vast geographical and cultural distances between Mosul and Massachusetts, Iraq and America, states formerly at war. But in Jean’s words, “like love, music is perfectly untranslatable—/it gathers us together.” And in Jabr’s words, since poetry “introduced me to myself,” in these poems we can be gathered and introduced to our widest selves.
—Philip Metres, author of Fugitive/Refuge
From the left: Jennifer Jean, Haana Ahmad Jabr, and Wadaq Qais
Upcoming Events
May 10th - Arrowsmith Press - Spring Book Launch in Cambridge,MA
May 25th - Rattlecast at 12pm EST on all podcasting platforms
June 1st - Where Do You Live? + Why & How to Read Poetry in Translation at the Mass Poetry Festival in Salem, MA.
As part of the Arrowsmith Press Featured Poet Series, Jennifer Jean described the history and process that led to this forthcoming book:
“Dr. Hanaa Ahmed and I are both members of the HER STORY IS collective, a group of Iraqi and American artists who promote projects that expand linguistic, artistic, and cultural boundaries in response to global conflict, with a focus on centralizing the experience of women. For a long time, we were the only two in the group whose primary art was poetry. We wanted to know each other, but, after three years of kind notes and news of publications and prizes, we didn’t really know each other.
“In 2020, we decided to communicate more purposefully, to write ‘poem responses’ to each other’s lives and work as a way of answering the question: ‘Where do you live?’ We didn’t only mean where we lived geographically, but also where we lived in regards to our moods, obsessions, regrets, tragedies, delights, etcetera. We stepped up our communications via Zoom, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger and shared as much as our hearts would allow.
“Hanaa told me, ‘I was born in the war. I grew in the war. I’m still in the war.’ I told her my father was absent my whole life because he suffered PTSD and schizophrenia as a result of his combat in the Vietnam War. She said she writes what she calls ‘prose poetry,’ which eschews classic Arabic forms for a more natural way of speaking. I said it sounds a lot like what I would call ‘free verse.’
“Through our co-translator Wadaq Qais, we spoke carefully and wrote figuratively. We also worked with Wadaq to co-translate each other’s poems. This co-translation process added another level of intimacy to our exchanges because we had to consider each other’s words more carefully than we would otherwise. We were required to consult an expert in each other’s language since both of us are mono-lingual. This has been a slow knowing! A quiet dance. We shared about how we compose and revise our poems, about how poets make themselves immortal.
“Hanaa once told me, ‘A poet’s life is fated.’ This is true. I believe our friendship is fated too. And, I know we both hope readers enjoy the poems in our forthcoming, collaborative collection Where do you live? أين تعيشين؟ and that they feel a part of what has been a life-changing relationship.”