CHR Book Launch- "Sleeping in the Courtyard: Contemporary Kurdish Writers in Diaspora"
Friday, September 12, 2025 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EDT
Horizon Hall 6325 and zoom
Please join us for a CHR Book Launch!
In celebrating the publication of Sleeping in the Courtyard: Contemporary Kurdish Writers in Diaspora, join us for a conversation with authors Holly Mason Badra and Meryem Uzumcu about the collection's process, content, and impact. They will explore topics related to erasure, gender, literary visibility, and more.
Coffee/tea provided.
There will be a Q&A at the end.
The event is hybrid (with our authors appearing in person), with the option to attend in person or on zoom (link emailed upon registration). Attendees will receive a discount code from the press to order the book if they choose!
More about the book: Sleeping in the Courtyard brings together historically isolated writers in community—and invites readers to join them around the table to share in their memories, secrets, tears, and joys. Featuring poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and graphic work by emerging and well-established writers, this collection shines a light on works by a diverse group of contemporary Kurdish women and nonbinary writers living in Kurdistan and in diaspora.
Recognizing the complex web of physical and lingual displacement of the Kurdish people and celebrating the diverse tapestry of their stories, this collection presents work originally written in English and work translated from Kurdish dialects as well as from Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Swedish. A few works in Kurdish dialects appear alongside their translations, both in recognition of the experience of linguicide and to push against oppressive attempts to strip away Kurdish language.
More about our speakers:
Holly Mason Badra is a Kurdish American writer. Her poetry, essays, reviews, and interviews appear in Meridian, The Arkansas International, The Rumpus, CALYX, Circumference, Asymptote, Oxford Bibliographies, and elsewhere. She is the associate director of Women and Gender Studies at George Mason University.
Meryem Rabia Uzumcu is a women's, gender, and sexuality studies PhD candidate at Rutgers University, where she is completing her dissertation on the state nexus of disability, race, and sexual violence in Diyarbekir. Her poems and audio story, "Family Rashomon," has been featured in Jasur Mag and also in the forthcoming anthology of Kurdish writers in diaspora with the University of Arkansas Press.
Partaking in Holly Mason Badra's project, Sleeping in the Courtyard has in many ways reiterated her commitments to shared oral histories through storytelling from her maternal family's homesite of Diyarbekir/Amed, a city critically situated in Kurdish anti-assimilation and anti-colonial struggle.
This event is co-sponsored by The Cheuse Center, The Global South Hub (Center for Social Science Research), and The Women and Gender Studies Program.
We thank our co-sponsors for their generous support of this event!
