Literary Partners Program: Kweli International Literary Festival

Author Sahar Mustafah reads from her book The Beauty of Your Face and has a conversation with writer Susan Muaddi Darraj.

This event is made possible through the Poets House Literary Partners program.

Sahar Mustafah is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, an inheritance she explores in her fiction. The Beauty of Your Face, her first novel, was named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and one of Marie Claire Magazine’s 2020 Best Fiction by Women. Her short story collection Code of the West was the winner of the 2016 Willow Books Fiction Award. Her stories have earned a Distinguished Story citation from Best American Short Stories 2016, and three Pushcart Prize nominations. She writes and teaches outside of Chicago.

Susan Muaddi Darraj’s short story collection, A Curious Land: Stories from Home, was named the winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, judged by Jaime Manrique.   It also won the 2016 Arab American Book Award, a 2016 American Book Award, and was shortlisted for a Palestine Book Award. Her previous short story collection, The Inheritance of Exile, was published in 2007 by University of Notre Dame Press.