New York launch of El Ghourabaa

Join us on September 12 at 7pm ET for our New York launch of El Ghourabaa: A Queer and Trans Collection of Oddities!

Featuring readings and discussion with:

Bazeed
Sarah O’Neal
Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch
Samia Marshy

Metonymy Press is delighted to have published its first-ever anthology!

Seeking uncanny, fun, experimental, creepy, sarcastic, playful, vulgar, inventive, sexual, weird, sweet, and evocative works, editors Samia Marshy and Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch set out to collect Arab and Arabophone queer writing. The result is an anthology brimming with gems by emerging and established writers and an homage to the lineages and complexities of queer Arab life. Multi-genre, multi-generational, and global, El Ghourabaa is an enigma, a delight, and a contribution to an ongoing conversation and creative outpouring.

Bazeed is a multi–award winning Egyptian immigrant, poet, playwright, performance artist, actor, literary translator, curator, editor, massage therapist, and cook, living in Brooklyn.

Sarah O’Neal is a queer Moroccan, Black, and Muslim artist and writer born and raised in the Bay Area. Sarah’s work grapples with the impact of colonial violence on familial memory and the way systems of oppression shape the most intimate detail of our lives. Sarah’s debut collection, Even Two Hands Pressed Together Are Split, brought together poetry, photography, and ephemera to create an immersive experience for readers to explore the way embodied trauma shapes all of our relationships. Her writing has been featured in the Institute for Palestine Studies, The Nation, and Teen Vogue. When she is not writing, you can find her scheming on the end of empire, swimming laps, or on IG and Twitter @atayqueen.

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a mixed Lebanese writer living in Tiohtià:ke. Their first book, knot body, was published by Metatron Press in 2020, and their second book, The Good Arabs, published by Metonymy Press in 2021, was granted an Honorable Mention from the 2022 Arab American Book Awards, an Honorable Mention for the 2022 Khayrallah Prize, and won the 2022 Grand Prix du livre de Montréal. Their translation from the French of Gabrielle Boulianne- Tremblay’s La fille d’elle-même came out spring 2023. They are an acquisitions editor at Metonymy Press.

Samia Marshy is a full-time reader and part-time writer located in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal, QC). She has been a practising massage therapist since 2015 and cares deeply about bodies, access to care, and consent in bodywork. She co-wrote “The Hands That Planted Them” with Lee Lai, published in Metal Hurlant, and was an editor for The Philistine by Leila Marshy.