This year we are very excited to present a youth writing workshop with the esteemed Ibtisam Barakat, an award-winning, Palestinian-American author, poet, translator, artist and educator.

About the workshop:

Write Your Life workshop is a creative social change platform focusing on the powerful art of writing as a tool for an expansive understanding. Participants are offered a creative environment to experiment with their genuine voices, speak and listen, and share personal stories toward building a more inclusive and representative book of humanity.

About Ibtisam Barakat:

Ibtisam Barakat is an award-winning, Palestinian-American author, poet, translator, artist and educator, based in the US. She publishes in both English and Arabic—her memoirs, Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood (2007), and Balcony on the Moon: Coming of Age in Palestine (2016), received considerable critical acclaim. Her poems, essays and short stories have appeared in magazines including The Nation, Wasafiri and the Washington Post. She won a 2020 Sheikh Zayed Book Award for illustrated children’s book Al-Fatah Al-Laylakeyyah (The Lilac Girl), her sixth book for younger readers. You can watch her TEDx talk about her transformative and cross-cultural love for language ("Songs of my foreign accent") on YouTube.