RAWIFest 2025 presenter applications are now open! The festival will be held in Houston, October 10-12. Get your applications in by Jan 31st, 11:59 PM PST. bit.ly/3ZugrZk
🧵On February 6th, we, the Radius of Arab American Writers, emailed panel moderators – our colleagues and fellow writers – at the upcoming Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference via publicly available email addresses.
Please read our statement on the powerful action that took place the #AWP24 book fair on Friday, as well as @awpwriter's continued lack of communication and transparency.
We, the Radius of Arab American Writers, stand firmly in solidarity with Palestinians in occupied Jerusalem, Gaza, and all of historic Palestine resisting settler-colonial violence.
See our statement below, including links to information & resources:
The Board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) grieves the passing of an extraordinary human and literary titan: Etel Adnan. Adnan’s contributions to RAWI in particular and to the storytelling world broadly cannot be overstated.
We have reached out to the Association multiple times for clarification on what (and whose) harassment and hostility they are referencing, and we have received no response. AWP’s message draws an insidious line between an invitation to global solidarity with oppressed
intimidate, and oppress marginalized writers. We urge AWP to clarify its statement and declare solidarity with all marginalized communities’ ability to practice free speech. For us, this speech is not merely abstract, but is tied to real and immediate survival.
communities and harassment or disruption. This potentially, and dangerously, equates the discomfort of witnessing free speech with abuse or violence. We hope that the Association did not intend to follow a call for solidarity with a statement about harassment in order to silence,
We are excited to announce that registration for RAWIFest is officially live! Huge thanks to our community who made this possible ❤️
All events will happen virtually with live captioning from June 10th - 13th. Registration is free and open to the public: eventbrite.com/e/rawifest-202…
We sent these members of our shared literary community an invitation to begin their programming at this year’s conference by acknowledging the genocide in Palestine. We provided some sample language acknowledging that genocide and expressing solidarity with Indigenous peoples,