Community Book Launch for Sarah Aziza’s “THE HOLLOW HALF” (Philly)

La La Lil Jidar presents a community celebration of Sarah Aziza’s debut memoir The Hollow Half (Catapult Books) followed by a post-reading conversation moderated by Camonghne Felix. Joining Aziza will be special guest readers Candice Iloh and Angbeen Saleem. Hosted by: Denice Frohman and Jess X. Snow. Books will be for sale and all proceeds will be donated to support Sarah Aziza’s family in Gaza.

Fundraising for Sarah Aziza’s family in Gaza: Our goal is to raise $5,000 to support Sarah’s family in Gaza who face a lack of food and adequate shelter after having been displaced multiple times because of the ongoing genocide. We will also have La La Lil Jidar posters, Palestine art, and shirts for sale.

Food will be provided by Renata’s Kitchen. We encourage attendees to come early (6PM) before the event begins (6:30PM) to eat, mingle and buy merch.

Limited tickets @ $45+ reserve a copy of The Hollow Half.

All other tickets sliding scale.

About “The Hollow Half”

The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza is a searing, genre-bending memoir tracing three generations of diasporic Palestinians from Gaza to the Midwest to New York City—and back. In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, was narrowly saved after being hospitalized for an eating disorder. The doctors revive her body, but it is no simple thing to return to the land of the living. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a mysterious incident summons the familiar voice of her deceased Palestinian grandmother.

As she responds to a series of ghostly dreams, Aziza unearths family secrets that reveal the ways her own trauma and anorexia echo generations of violent Palestinian displacement and erasure—and how her fight to recover builds on a century of defiant survival and love. As she moves towards this legacy, Aziza learns to resist the forces of colonization, denial, and patriarchy both within and outside her.

Breathtaking, fiercely honest. . .Sarah Aziza weaves a genre-bending memoir of body and land, an unflinching look at the tyranny of emotional, physical, and intrapsychic hunger. These hungerings—complex, visceral, ever-present—frame a story of hauntings, erasures, colonization, and the metaphor and reality of Palestine. But The Hollow Half is not merely a dissection of absence; it is an expansion of genre itself, gorgeously blending memoir with dreamwork, ancestral secrets with reclaimed history. Through stunning, transformative prose, Aziza writes both herself—and the reader—towards liberation.” —Hala Alyan, author of The Moon That Turns You Back

About Sarah Aziza (author)

Sarah Aziza (she/هي ) is a Palestinian American writer, translator, and artist with roots in ‘Ibdis and Deir al-Balah, Gaza. She is the author of The Hollow Half, a genre-bending work of memoir, lyricism, and oral history exploring the intertwined legacies of diaspora, colonialism, and the American dream.

Sarah’s award-winning journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Essays, The Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Nation, among other publications.

About Asian Arts Initiative

Accessibility note: this event is on the ground floor and do not need stairs to enter

Connecting cultural expression and social change, Asian Arts Initiative uses art as a vehicle to explore the diverse experiences of all communities which include Asian Americans. Located in Philadelphia’s Chinatown North, Asian Arts Initiative is a multidisciplinary arts center offering exhibitions, performances, artist residencies, youth workshops, and a community gathering space. Here, all of us can view and create art that reflects our lives, and think critically, creatively about the future we want to build for our communities.

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