Crossings: Writing into the Maelstrom and the Poetry of Witness

CMES presents the Fall 2025 Hilda B. Silverman Memorial lecture with

Lisa Suhair Majaj, PhD
Poet, writer, editor, and scholar

Watch Lisa Suhair Majaj's lecture on YouTube

Lisa Suhair Majaj is a poet, writer, scholar, editor and children’s author. She holds a BA from the American University of Beirut and an MA in English Literature, an MA in American Culture, and a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.  Her poetry collection Geographies of Light won the 2008 Del Sol Press Poetry Prize. Select poems have been translated into Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, Lithuanian, German, Indonesian, Malayalam, and Chinese. Her poetry was displayed in the exhibition Aftermath: The Fallout of War—America and the Middle East at the Harn Museum of Art, 2016 and was used in the 2024 limited-edition art book Passport of Witness. Her scholarly work includes the co-edited critical volumes Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women's Novels, Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist, Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers, and the forthcoming The Companion to Contemporary Arab American Literature. Her writing appears in the recent anthologies Heaven Looks Like Us (Haymarket), Unsilenced: Poems for Palestine (Horizons and Daraja Press), Ask the Night for a Dream: Palestinian Writing from the Diaspora (Palestine Writes Press) and Fifty Poems for Palestine (Dahlia Books). Her new poetry collection Why Doesn’t the Sky Love Us? is forthcoming. She may be reached at lisamajaj@gmail.com.

Contact: Liz Flanagan