Opening Ceremony

All conference participants are invited to join us for our virtual opening reception. Following brief opening remarks by ACLA President Karen Emmerich, Huda Fakhreddine (recently elected to the ACLA presidential ladder) will moderate a reading and conversation with poet Joan Naviyuk Kane and prose writer Adania Shibli. We are very honored to welcome these extraordinary writers to share their work and words with us.

Joan Naviyuk Kane’s works include The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, Hyperboreal, The Straits, Milk Black Carbon, Sublingual, A Few Lines in the Manifest, Another Bright Departure, Dark Traffic, and Ex Machina, in addition to with snow pouring southward past the window forthcoming in the 2026 Pitt Poetry Series and & all the ones who chose to leave her, winner of the 2024 Omnidawn Chapbook Contest. She has also co-edited the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology (House of Anansi Press), Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic (Wesleyan University Press), and the forthcoming Colonialism and the Environments: Past, Presents, Futures (Heidelberg University Press). A Guggenheim Fellow, Radcliffe Fellow, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellow, and Whiting Award and Paul Engle Prize recipient, she’s a 2025 United States Artists Fellow raising her children as a single mother in Oregon, where she’s an Associate Professor at Reed College.

Adania Shibli (Palestine, 1974) has written novels, plays, short stories and narrative essays. She has twice been awarded with the Qattan Young Writer’s Award-Palestine in 2001 and in 2003. Her latest is the novel Tafsil Thanawi (Al-Adab, 2017, translated as Minor Detail, Fitzcarraldo Edition/UK, and New Directions/USA, 2020), which was shortlisted for the National Book Award in 2020, and in 2021 it was nominated for the International Booker Prize. Shibli is also engaged in academic research and teaching in different universities across Europe, as well as at Birzeit University, Palestine (2012-2018). Currently she's a co-curator of the Bergen Assembly 2025, Bergen, Norway.