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Zeyn Joukhadar

Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Thirty Names of Night and The Map of Salt and Stars.

Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the Lambda Literary- and Stonewall Book Award-winning novel The Thirty Names of Night as well as The Map of Salt and Stars, which won the Middle East Book Award and was a Goodreads Choice Awards and Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize finalist. His work has appeared in Electric Literature, Salon, The Paris Review, [PANK], and elsewhere and has been included in anthologies such as Letters to a Writer of Color, This Arab Is Queer, Kink, and others. He has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Joukhadar serves on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and mentors emerging writers of color with the Periplus Collective. He is currently adapting The Thirty Names of Night as an immersive theater piece set in New York City, commissioned by Noor Theatre Company.

Kunafa & Shay teaser image with guest headshots.
Home and Exile in Queer MENA Theatremaking
Podcast

Home and Exile in Queer MENA Theatremaking

6 December 2023

MENA cultures are deeply familial with a strong connection to home, defined geographically and through close family bonds. With fraught political and religious opinions about queerness throughout the region, making queer art can threaten those deep connections. How do queer MENA artists consider those complications when making theatre? How do individuals change culture in the face of possible exile? Multi-hyphenate artists Zeyn Joukhadar and Raphaël Aimé Khouri interrogate these questions.