Loft Literary Center
1011 South Washington Avenue
Target Performance Hall | Open Book, 2nd Floor
Minneapolis, MN 55415
United States
Member: $5 | Regular: $10
The Loft Literary Center Presents a 2018-2019 Loft Mentor Series Reading with mentor Moustafa Bayoumi and fellows Anessa Ibrahim and Jaya Stenquist. Book sales provided by Milkweed Books. Learn more.
Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the critically acclaimed How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (Penguin), which won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction. The book has also been translated into Arabic by Arab Scientific Publishers. His latest book, This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror (NYU Press), was chosen as a Best Book of 2015 by The Progressive magazine and was also awarded the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction for Peace. In 2015, he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters by Southern Vermont College. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Anessa Ibrahim (fiction) is a fiction writer from Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction. She holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and is a recipient of a 2018 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative grant. She is currently working on a novel.
Jaya Stenquist (poetry) studied poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she was the 2013-2015 Martha Meir Rank Distinguished Graduate Fellow in Poetry. Her work has appeared in West Branch Wired, Mid-American Review, and in English and Icelandic in Iceview. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with her two cats.
Moustafa Bayoumi was born in Zürich, Switzerland, and raised in Canada. He earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University and is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, the City University of New York. He is the author of This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror, which was chosen as a Best Book of 2015 by The Progressive magazine and awarded the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction. He edited Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: the Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict and is co-editor of The Edward Said Reader. How Does It Feel To Be a Problem? won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction. Bayoumi is also a frequent contributor to The Guardian, and his writing has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, The National, CNN.com, The London Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other publications. He is the recipient of two excellence in teaching awards, a 2011 Culture and Achievement Award from the Network of Arab American Professionals, and a 2016 Pathmaker to Peace Award from the organization Brooklyn for Peace. In 2015, he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters by Southern Vermont College. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.