Maha Hashwi is a writer and spoken word poet whose work explores the complexities of growing up Lebanese American in Dearborn, Michigan. Unapologetic in her identity as a Muslim and Arab woman, she writes at the intersection of culture, faith, family, and belonging. She leads a community writing workshop, Anyone Can Write, encouraging people of all backgrounds to put their stories on the page. Maha has participated in the Aspen Institute’s Summer Words Writers Conference in Poetry and the Tin House Winter Workshop. She now lives in New York City.
Browse Related Books
"These poems are so richly and beautifully populated, with vibrant image, with the musicality of language, but also with people, the living and the dead, the ancestors and present guiding lights. Within this book, there is not a single universe, there are several, each of them honored by the precision and heart that is present in the craft. What a gift." — Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There's Always This Year
“In The Pomegranate Is a Grenade, Maha Hashwi writes with tenderness, wit and devastating clarity about what it means to come of age between worlds: the mosque and the internet, family and selfhood, homeland and city, love and grief, memory and survival. These poems move from childhood rituals to dating apps, from the intimacy of a hijab borrowed from a mother to the horror of a body made into shrapnel. Hashwi’s language is playful, searching and sharp, alive to the absurdities of modern life and the sacredness of what we carry. This collection understands that every ordinary object—a fig, a hard drive, a coffee shop, a pomegranate—can hold a universe, and that even sweetness can become explosive in a world built to break what it cannot contain.” — Noor Hindi, author of Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow
“Maha Hashwi’s The Pomegranate Is a Grenade is a collection of startling emotional candor and fierce political clarity. These poems understand displacement not as a single event but as a lifelong condition: linguistic, geographic, romantic, spiritual. My Arabic wouldn’t be broken, it would be whole, Hashwi writes, in a line that distills the ache of diaspora with devastating precision, while elsewhere insisting, love isn’t just a phrase. Her poems move fluidly between family kitchens, prayer, heartbreak, headlines, refusing to separate the personal from the political; grief for the self and grief for the world exist in the same bloodstream. This is a debut of tremendous heart and conviction, from a voice unafraid to be both vulnerable and unsparing.” — Hala Alyan, author of I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, 2026 Pulitzer Prize Finalist
Any use of an author photo must include its respective photo credit
.
Watch your inbox for the Children Bookseller Newsletter
If you would like to receive the Children Bookseller email, please check below. Or visit our preference center to select the newsletter(s) you prefer.
