Lenna Jawdat is a poet, writer, professor, and psychotherapist of Palestinian and Iraqi descent. Her writing, which explores trauma, identity and resilience, has appeared in journals such as Poet Lore, The Margins, Passenger’s Journal, Rogue Agent, among others, and in the 2025 Haymarket Anthology Heaven Looks Like Us. She was a 2021 Best of the Net nominee for her poem “Ode to the Psoas,” a 2022 Sundress Academy for the Arts summer resident, and has attended Tin House Workshop for poetry and creative nonfiction. She is also co-organizer of the poetry vigil series In Water and Light. Lenna received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in May 2024. She lives in DC with her partner and two cats.
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"A precious poetess of Palestinian descent excavates the archeology of loss and erasure with a creative cri de coeur, meticulously researched and illustrated. She distills striking historical landmarks into a poignant tableau of pain. Lenna Jawdat mines cultural symbols that sustain overlooked Palestinian identity and roots, weaving them into a novel format, breaking the wounds of invisibility and suppressed slights wide open. Now that the world is watching, this is a tender, honest and unique gem of a book." — Nora Boustany, former Middle East Washington Post correspondent and columnist
“Lenna Jawdat’s generous hybrid collection is part diary, part historical record, part ritual, and all ode. I feel deep gratitude for this love-act. Through her meditation Jawdat undertakes a transformative and laborious accounting which poses rippling questions: On stolen land, who counts? Who might never be accounted for? In the face of mammoth loss––of a people, of stories, of home––Jawdat chooses the powerful combination of ink and vulnerability. Slowly, steadfastly, she lays bare her inherited trauma alongside her “inherited resilience,” making legible what’s been invisibilized, vowing “I will document them somehow / Each number a tombstone / Something to return to.” Long after I’m done reading, I feel the reverberations of her hajj. Her markings evoke not just a graveyard, but a body returning to what it loves.” –– Shira Erlichman, author of Odes to Lithium
"What is the legacy of diaspora? How does one cure homesickness without recourse to home? How do we continue to live with our grief even as the causes of our grief are ongoing? “Sometimes the things we are witnessing are too much to bear,” Jawdat writes. And yet, we go on because we must, because we can, through the community we carry with us, that history would erase. That is the work of the poet: to remember the humanity behind the history too easily corrupted, and to remember the worlds lived and dreamed. To remind us all that if we inherit trauma in the body, we also inherit resilience, and we forge the inheritance of those who follow after. A tender work, most urgently needed." –– Abigail Chabitnoy, author of In the Current Where Drowning is Beautiful
“Jawdat has written a debut that will sit with you longer than it will take to have read it. This poetry will make you wonder how can somewhere be your home without that things that make it a home. Such striking prose and powerful visuals. None of us are free until we all are.” — Ollie Mendez, Skylight Books, Los Angeles, CA
“I have rarely been so affected by a book, any book. I couldn’t put 70,000 down, so enraptured was I by Jawdat’s project and her multi-media approach to exploring unspeakable loss, heartache, bewilderment, exile, identity, family, love, and yes, hope. A truly original and remarkable work, seeking to remember what has been lost but also reaching towards what can be.” — Toni Thayer, Loganberry Books, Cleveland, OH
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