Author Event: "Between Two Moons" with author, Aisha Abdel Gawad and Sally Wen Mao.

About the Book:

Perfect for readers of Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom, Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers, Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies, and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and fans of Brit Bennett, Jesmyn Ward, and Laila Lalami, BETWEEN TWO MOONS examines the ugly truths and the prices paid for the American Dream. Drawing inspiration from her own experience of growing up as the daughter of  Muslim immigrants under the specter of post-9/11 Islamophobia and US engagement in multiple wars on multiple fronts against Arabs and Muslims; her first job at an Arab American community center and social services agency in Bay Ridge; research into NYPD and CIA intelligence reports; and her keen insight into the realities of female friendship at the cusp of adulthood as a high school English teacher, Gawad offers an intimate coming-of-age story and a polyphonic portrait of life in a surveillance state and asks us to question our own assumptions about faith, family, allegiance, and community.

About the Author:

Aisha Abdel Gawad has been published in The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, and the scholarly journal The Muslim World in a special issue on Anglophone Muslim women writers. She won a 2015 Pushcart Prize for her short story “Waking Luna.” This is her first novel.

About the Conversation Partner:

Sally Wen Mao is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection The Kingdom of Surfaces (Graywolf Press, 2023), and the debut fiction collection Ninetails (Penguin Books). She is also the author of two previous poetry collections, Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). The recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she was recently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library and a Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute.