Holly Mason Badra — Sleeping in the Courtyard: Contemporary Kurdish Writers in Diaspora - with Heba El-Shazli

Sleeping in the Courtyard shines a light on works by a group of diverse contemporary Kurdish women and nonbinary writers living in Kurdistan and in diaspora. Featuring poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and graphic work by both emerging and well-established writers, this collection recognizes the complex web of physical and lingual displacement of the Kurdish people. It presents work originally written in English and work translated from Kurdish dialects as well as from Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Swedish. A few works in Kurdish dialects appear alongside their translations, both in recognition of the history of linguicide and to push against oppressive attempts to strip away Kurdish language.This collection showcases variety in representation, point of view, identity, intersectional experience, geographical context, and style. What emerges is the anthesis of erasure. Sleeping in the Courtyard brings together historically isolated writers in community--and invites readers to join around their table to share in their stories, laughter, tears, secrets, memories, and warmth.PURCHASE BOOK: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781682262733?ic_referral=KnRPCaML3z_Bz-MztpRHp6F6QcZ4t2YvqQEtmpt5ZoUwM4Yzmbza2UBbUmuWVOL04wyeskdnoROcOEmN1Hus5uTo4dbhL5OsfUcg4Wfpxavj8jrrpyLa80ySTl-eHFANq7H6eG0Holly Mason Badra is a Kurdish-American writer. Her poetry, essays, reviews, and interviews appear in Meridian, The Arkansas International, The Rumpus, CALYX, Circumference, Asymptote, and elsewhere. She is currently the associate director of Women and Gender Studies at George Mason University. She reads for Poetry Daily.Badra is in conversation with Heba F. El-Shazli, an Egyptian American and an avid lover and reader of literature from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. She is an associate professor of political science (retired as of June 2025) at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. Heba taught courses on governments and politics of the Middle East and North Africa, Islam and politics, international relations, Israel and Palestine, and the role of civil society and social movements in democratization. She has been teaching at Politics & Prose bookstore since 2013 and she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. During the 2023-24 academic year, she was a visiting academic at St Antony’s College, Oxford University. Heba recently (February - April 2025) taught a series of classes at Politics and Prose about the Kurds and their literature in an attempt to better understand the Kurdish people: their culture, history, society and politics.