An independent, ad-free leftist magazine of critical essays, poetry, fiction, and art.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist and translator. She is the author of Water & Salt (Red Hen), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award, Kaan & Her Sisters (Trio House Press), finalist for the Firecracker Award, and Something About Living (UAkron, 2024), a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award and winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry. Her writing has been published in journals including The Los Angeles Review of Books, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Nation, Poets.org, and Prairie Schooner and in anthologies including The Long Devotion and We Call to the Eye and the Night. She was the translator and curator of the 2022 series “Poems from Palestine” at The Baffler magazine. She is currently curating a year-long subscription of Palestinian poetry books with Open Books, Seattle’s poetry-only bookstore. For more about her work, visit www.lenakhalaftuffaha.com
  • What to the Arab American Is Election Day

    What to the Arab American Is Election Day

    Lena Tuffaha’s “What to the Arab American Is Election Day” cuts through the noise of US electoral politics to remind us that, more than anything else, today is “A Tuesday in the second November of the Genocide.”

  • Two Poems

    Two Poems

    “Garden Variety” and “Maqluba,” two poems by writer and translator Lena Tuffaha, traverse the brutalized landscapes of Palestinian history as well as the deceptions of Western diplomacy.