Birthright: A Virtual Poetry Reading with George Abraham

George Abraham’s highly anticipated debut Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) constructs a dialogue in which “every pronoun is a Free Palestine.” Through poems of immense emotion, and the use of alluring form, Abraham crafts work that examines what we come to own by existing. As trauma seeps through generations, can the body deconstruct its own inheritance? In a world that only takes, what is owed? George Abraham is a Palestinian American poet and writer from Jacksonville, FL. Their debut Birthright won the Big Other Book Award and the Arab American Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry. He is a board member for the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and The Boston Foundation, and winner of the 2017 College Union Poetry Slam Invitational’s Best Poet title. Their work has appeared in The Nation, American Poetry Review, The Baffler, The Paris Review, Mizna, and elsewhere. A graduate of Swarthmore College and Harvard University, Abraham currently teaches at Emerson College and is a Litowitz MFA+MA Candidate at Northwestern University.