Announcing Winners of 2017 Arab American Book Awards

The 2017 Arab American Book Award winners have been announced, with a ceremony to celebrate coming up in October. The George Ellenbogen Poetry Award went to Something Sinister (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2016), by Hayan Charara; and honorable mentions in Poetry went to One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press, 2016) by Lauren Camp, and Hagar Poems (University of Arkansas Press, 2016) by Mohja Kahf. Those descriptions:

Honorable Mention - Poetry

One Hundred Hungers
By Lauren Camp
(North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2016)

In her new collection, Lauren Camp explores the lives of a first-generation Arab-American girl and her Jewish-Iraqi parent. One Hundred Hungers tells overlapping stories of food and ritual, immigration and adaptation, evoking her father’s boyhood in Baghdad in the 1940s at a time when tensions began to emerge along ethnic and religious lines. She also draws upon memories of Sabbath dinners in her grandparents' new home in America to reveal how family culture persists.

Lauren Camp is author of two previous books of poems, This Business of Wisdom (West End Press, 2010) and The Dailiness (Edwin E. Smith, 2013), which was an "Editor’s Pick" by World Literature Today and winner of the National Federation of Press Women's 2014 Poetry Book Prize. Since 2004, she has produced and hosted Santa Fe Public Radio's "Audio Saucepan," which entwines music with contemporary poetry. She lives in New Mexico.

Hagar Poems
By Mohja Kahf
(Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2016)

The central matter of this new collection is the story of Hagar, Abraham, and Sarah -- the ancestral feuding family of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These poems delve into the Hajar story in Islam. They explore other figures from the Near Eastern heritage, such as Mary and Moses, and touch on figures from early Islam, such as Fatima and Aisha. Throughout, there is artful reconfiguring. Readers will find sequels and prequels to the traditional narratives, along with modernized figures claimed for contemporary conflicts. Hagar Poems is a compelling shakeup of not only Hagar's story but also of current roles of all kinds of women in all kinds of relationships.

Mohja Kahf was born in Damascus, Syria, in 1967 to parents who immigrated to the United States in 1971. She is the author of a poetry book, E-mails from Scheherazad, and a novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf.

Read about all the winners and mentions at the Arab American National Museum. At top: winner Hayan Charara.