Current Projects
Other Paths for Shahrazad: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Arab Women
Book Launch: March 28th, 2026
A bilingual anthology of contemporary poetry by forty women poets from eleven Arab nations.
A project of the Her Story Is (HSI) collective, led by Iraqi and American women writers and artists, Other Paths for Shahrazad features poems curated by the Iraqi contingent of HSI. Each poem was cotranslated by HSI members and collaborators from Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Canada, and the United States.
The anthology is arranged so that the poems are in dialogue with each other, rather than separated into stark sections according to theme, region, or author, so that the reader experiences it as they experience a standard collection of poetry: as a potent journey, as poems speaking to poems.
Masthead:
Edited by Jennifer Jean
Managing Editor/Co-Translator: Abeer Abdulkareem
Associate Editors/Co-Translators: Amir Al-Azraki, Julia Gettle, Mohamed Hassan, Mahmoud Nowara
Poetry Curators: Hanaa Ahmad Jabr, Elham Nasser Al-Zabedy, Rasha Fahdil, Jackleen Hanna Salam
Arabic Text Editor: Miled Faiza
Contributing Co-Translators: Dima Al-Basha, Yafa al-Shayeb, Francesca Bell, Martha Collins, Dzivinia Orlowsky, Danielle Pieratti, Susan Rich, Cindy Veach
Black Ocean Press presents groundbreaking English translations of contemporary women poets from Iraq and the broader Arab world whose work emerges from landscapes of conflict and renewal. By amplifying voices that challenge dominant narratives about Arab women's lives and art, this series creates vital pathways for cultural exchange and solidarity across borders. These collections not only center intimate experiences of memory, identity, and transformation, but also invite readers into vivid poetic worlds where personal and collective histories interweave, where language itself becomes a site of reclamation and reimagining. Our mission is to publish poetry that crosses linguistic boundaries and reshapes how we understand translation as an act of witness, connection, and shared imagination.
The first book in the series is I Drag My Sorrow by His Collar by Hanaa Ahmed Jabr, co-translated by Jennifer Jean and Wadaq Qais.
A note about Fairuz: Nouhad Wadie Haddad, known as Fairuz, is a Lebanese singer. She is widely considered an iconic vocalist and one of the most celebrated singers in the history of the Arab world. According to Egyptian Streets, "Her timeless melodies intertwine with Arab literature, drawing upon the works of countless writers and poets who came before her." In her song "What Remains of the Story?" she sings: What remains of the sea, of the summer, of what has passed? Of sadness, of contentment? What remains… what remains… what remains, my love? Tiny stories scattered by the wind. This series honors Fairuz and the women inspired by her legacy.
More details coming soon.
Songs for Fairuz: New Arab Women's Poetry
WHERE DO YOU LIVE?أين تعيش؟
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 Jabr 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, Hanaa Ahmad Jabr, and Wadaq Qais
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.”