Lenna Jawdat and Susan Muaddi Darraj: “70,000: POEMS”

1:00 pm

Presented by The Ivy

A conversation about Lenna Jawdat’s 70,000: an “embodied meditation on cultural displacement, memory, and resilience.”

70,000 is a visceral and inventive poetry collection inspired by the removal of approximately 70,000 books from Palestinian homes and private libraries before and during the events of 1948. Of those books, most have not been returned; about 6,000 remain housed in Israeli national collections, where they are largely inaccessible to Palestinians.

A powerful act of remembrance and resistance, 70,000 transforms cultural erasure into an archive of grief, memory, and hope.

Lenna Jawdat

Lenna Jawdat is a poet, writer, and psychotherapist of Palestinian and Iraqi descent. Her work has been published in Poet Lore, The Massachusetts Review, The Margins, and elsewhere. She was a 2021 Best of the Net nominee, an artist in residence at Sundress Academy for the Arts (2023) and Vermont Studio Center (2025) and a Tin House alum. Lenna received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in May 2024. Her debut book, 70,000, was selected for Summer/Fall 2026 Indies Introduce and July 2026 Indies Next by the American Booksellers Association. She lives in DC on the ancestral land of the Anacostan people.

Susan Muaddi Darraj

Susan Muaddi Darraj is an award-winning writer of books for adults and children. She won an American Book Award, two Arab American Book Awards, and a Maryland State Arts Council Independent Artists Award. In 2018, she was named a USA Artists Ford Fellow. Her books include her linked short story collection, A Curious Land, as well as the Farah Rocks children’s book series. She lives in Baltimore, where she teaches creative writing at Harford Community College and the Johns Hopkins University. Her new novel, BEHIND YOU IS THE SEA, was published in January 2024 by HarperVia. It received praise from The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Ms Magazine, and it was named a Best Book of 2024 by The New Yorker and Apple Books. Behind You Is the Sea was also a finalist for the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award.