The summer 2020 issue of Mizna is guest edited by Zeyn Joukhadar and speaks to bodily autonomy, embodiment, and self-determination within a queer, transgender, SWANA, and Muslim lens. Mizna: Queer + Trans Voices bears witness to our rich history, and imagines futures for ourselves. Within these pages, we not only exist, and are loved, and are beautiful; we create magic. We turn our eyes toward worlds of our own making. Read Zeyn’s foreword to the issue here: Worlds of Our Own Making.
Contributions from Dina Abdulhadi, Rasha Abdulhadi, Kamee Abrahamian, Danielle Badra, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, Michael Chang, Tarik Dobbs, Hazem Fahmy, Carissa Halston, Ghinwa Jawhari, Marlin M. Jenkins, Joe Kadi, Mena Kamel, Nour Kamel, Nihal Mubarak, Aiya Sakr, Omar Sakr, Trish Salah, Mejdulene B. Shomali, Fargo Tbakhi. Visual art by Cumaea Halim.
Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Map of Salt and Stars (Touchstone/S&S, 2018) and The Thirty Names of Night (Atria/S&S, 19 May 2020), a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), and a member of American Mensa. His work has appeared in Salon, The Paris Review, Mizna, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. The Map of Salt and Stars, currently being translated into twenty languages, was a 2018 Middle East Book Award winner in Youth Literature, a 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist in Historical Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. Joukhadar has received fellowships from the Montalvo Arts Center, the Arab American National Museum, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Camargo Foundation, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.
Mizna is a critical platform for contemporary literature, art, film, and cultural programming centering the work of Arab and Southwest Asian and North African artists. They publish Mizna: Prose, Poetry and Art Exploring Arab America, the only Arab American lit and art journal in the US; produce the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival, the largest and longest running Arab film fest in the Midwest; and offer classes, readings, performances, public art, and community events.
