My Mother Talks to the Moon

Zeina Azzam is Rowayat’s Issue 14 Poetry Editor. She is a Palestinian American poet, writer, editor, and community activist. Her publications include the full-length poetry book, Some Things Never Leave You, the chapbook, Bayna Bayna, In-Between, the collection, Poems for Alexandria, and poems in literary journals and anthologies including Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Mizna, Sukoon, Barzakh, Rusted Radishes, Split This Rock, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance, Bettering American Poetry, Writing the Land: Virginia, Making Levantine Cuisine: Modern Foodways of the Eastern Mediterranean, Making Mirrors: Writing/Righting by and for Refugees, and Gaza Unsilenced.

Zeina has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. Her poem, “You Birth the Seeds,” was set as a choral piece by renowned composer Melissa Dunphy and her poem about Gaza in October 2023, “Write My Name,” went viral internationally and has been translated to over ten languages. A composer in the Netherlands also set “Write My Name,” along with three other poems of Zeina’s, as a choral suite titled “Four Songs for Gaza.”

Zeina served as the poet laureate of Alexandria, Virginia, for 2022-25. She worked in the fields of education and Middle East affairs for most of her professional career, including 27 years at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Since 2016, she has volunteered as a mentor for We Are Not Numbers, a writing program for youth in Gaza, and is currently WANN’s poetry editor. Zeina holds an M.A. in Arabic literature from Georgetown University.