George Abraham
George Abraham (he/they) is a Palestinian American poet and writer from Jacksonville, FL. He is the author of the poetry collection, Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020), winner of the 2021 Arab American Book Award in Poetry and 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 grants and fellowships from Kundiman, The Boston Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation, and winner of the 2018 Cosmonauts Avenue Poetry Prize selected by Tommy Pico.
A graduate of Swarthmore College and Harvard University, guest lecturer at Stanford University, and affiliated faculty member at Emerson College, Abraham is currently based in Chicago, IL, where he is a Litowitz MFA+MA Candidate in poetry at Northwestern University. They are currently working on a theatrical collaboration, EVE, with Fargo Tbakhi, and are co-editing an anthology of Palestinian poetry with Noor Hindi for Haymarket Books.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:
POETRY: “Searching for a Palestinian After,” The Nation
POETRY: “Taking Back Jerusalem,” World Literature Today
INTERVIEW: “George Abraham vs. Returning,” The VS Podcast
POETRY: “before he was their ‘great poet’” & “Autobiography Of.” The Baffler
POETRY: “Searching for a Palestinian Necropastoral (Eve),” Poem-a-day
POETRY: "To All The Ghosts I've Loved Before,” The Missouri Review
ESSAY: "Imagining a Free Palestine: an Ekphrasis on a Fragmented Nationalism,” The Paris Review
INTERVIEW: “To Remember, Read, & Return - A Conversation with George Abraham and Omar Sakrm,” The Los Angeles Review of Books
works:
Birthright
Button Poetry, 2020
The Specimen’s Apology
Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019
al youm
The Atlas Review, 2017
Topics addressed in readings
Diasporic and non-western notions of queerness
Palestine
Historical and ancestral memory; disembodied memory
Invented forms and experimental poetics
Mental health and intersections with identity
Disembodied memory
Bodily trauma & survival
Spoken word performance
SAMPLE WORKSHOP 1: Here the Sentence Will be Respected (on Form & Language)
A workshop on deconstructing the formal/ linguistic borders of their poems, in order to build a new language from the breakage and write against colonial linguistic constructs.
SAmple workshop 2: It's My Party & I'll ___ If I Want To (on mess & Memory)
A workshop diving deeper into the poem’s ability to lean into mess as a personal and generative measure; to take control of the camera, force its gaze to our ugliest and most uncomfortable moments, and hold it there.
TESTIMONIALS
“George Abraham writes, “i am always translating” – from the sizzling, flaring elements of Palestinian/universal displacement, immigration struggles, gender identity, body & memory as “fragmented countries” too, he has built a bold, brilliant book. His poems burn with questioning, “I was not always crumbled fortress & concrete/partition,” they leap with energy. Here is a love too wide for containment, illuminating layers of story – family & land, political yet passionately personal. In a lineage of many broken hearts & heart attacks, here is a heart too brave to mutter or flail.”
“Searing away binaries, demolishing the calcified partitions between halves—this is the project George Abraham’s the specimen’s apology. Boy/man, man/woman, history/present, conflict/occupation, English/Arabic, poetry/visual art—the gulf between each is breached, shrunk, erased, widened, warped. “I am always translating,” Abraham tells us in one poem—and it is the wild desperate yearning of the translator, working in vain to achieve perfect fidelity to a source, that powers these poems: ‘if desire is, / as my language translates, a moon, / let this body be the satellite.”
