Word for Word Exchange: Arabic
Columbia University School of the Arts & Columbia Global Centers | Middle East (Amman) | 2012
In May 2012, Professor and former Program Chair Binnie Kirshenbaum and MFA Writing student Hannah Assadi visited the Columbia Global Centers | Middle East (Amman) for a collaboration on Arabic literature.
Assadi met daily at the CGC with Syrian author & journalist Ahmed Danny Ramadan, whose work she translated into English while he translated her short story into Arabic, in a short-term collaboration based on the Word for Word model. Professor Kirshenbaum met with local scholars & artists and gave a public reading of her work at CANVAS Art Gallery.
To celebrate the culmination of the exchange, Professor Kirshenbaum delivered a public lecture at the CGC Amman entitled “The Why and How of Teaching Creative Writing,” which included an introduction highlighting the Word for Word exchange in which Assadi & Ramadan read excerpts from their translations.
Participants:
HANNAH LILLITH ASSADI received her MFA in fiction from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2013. She received her bachelor's at Columbia in creative writing and was awarded the university's Philolexian Prize for her short stories and poetry. Her fiction has been published in various journals. She just completed her first novel, Sonora. She was raised in Arizona, and lives in Brooklyn.
AHMED DANNY RAMADAN is a Syrian writer currently based in Vancouver. He began his career as a journalist in Egypt in 2004, and has since written on topics including the Arab Spring, struggles faced by sexual minorities in the Arab world, and women & children’s rights. In 2012 he began reporting for the Washington Post’s Beirut bureau. He has published two short story collections in Arabic, and his first novel in English, The Clothesline Swing, is forthcoming in 2015.
Institutional Partners:
The COLUMBIA GLOBAL CENTERS | MIDDLE EAST (AMMAN) was established in March 2009 as one of the first in the network of Columbia Global Centers. The Center was launched under the patronage of Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah and was created because of the realization of President Lee C. Bollinger, and a number of other University leaders, that Columbia needed to learn more about the world around it and engage more fully with global partners. With its headquarters in Amman, Jordan, the Center serves as a hub for programs and educational initiatives throughout the Middle East.
Participating Faculty:
BINNIE KIRSHENBAUM received a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from Brooklyn College. She is the author of the story collection History on a Personal Note and six novels, On Mermaid Avenue, A Disturbance in One Place, Pure Poetry, Hester Among The Ruins, An Almost Perfect Moment and The Scenic Route. Her novels have been chosen as Notable Books of the Year by The Chicago Tribune, NPR, Time, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Washington Post; she twice won Critics Choice Awards and was selected by Granta as one of the Best Young American novelists. She’s published short fiction and essays in many magazines and anthologies. Her work has been widely translated.