"Ghazals for the Homeland"

Syrian American poet/novelist Mohja Kahf makes a rare Southern California appearance at the Levantine Cultural Center, on Wednesday, July 14, where she will read from, sign and discuss her books The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, and E-mails from Scheherazad. As the New York Times wrote, "Mohja Kahf, an Arab-American writer, draws sharp, funny, earthy portraits of the fault line separating Muslim women from their Western counterparts." Read a Mohja Kahf poem, "Ghazal for Iranians Who Don't Hate Arabs."

Poet and novelist Mohja KahfBorn in Damascus, Syria, Mohja Kahf is an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Arkansas. She has published three books: a novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, a volume of poetry, E-mails from Scheherazad, and Western Representations of the Muslim Woman. Her poems have been projected on the facade of the New York Public Library, and published in more conventional venues such as Mizna, Banipal, Paris Review, Tiferet: A Journal of Literature and Spirituality, and Atlanta Review, as well as the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond from W.W. Norton, and Hayan Charara's Inclined to Speak. Some of Kahf's short fiction was online at MuslimWakeUp.com's "Sex and the Ummah" column. An Arkansas resident for the last fourteen years, Kahf has lived in the Arab world and returns there regularly with her husband and three children. Kahf's next poetry manuscript is about Hajar, Sarah, and Abraham, and she is working on a book of essays on interfaith and faith issues, called Love, Anyway: Letters from Your Muslim Aunty. Read a New York Times profile about Mohja.

About The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

"The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf"Syrian immigrant Khadra Shamy is growing up in a devout, tightly knit Muslim family in 1970s Indiana, at the crossroads of bad polyester and Islamic dress codes. Along with her brother Eyad and her African-American friends, Hakim and Hanifa, she bikes the Indianapolis streets exploring the fault-lines between "Muslim" and "American."

When her picture-perfect marriage goes sour, Khadra flees to Syria and learns how to pray again. On returning to America she works in an eastern state - taking care to stay away from Indiana, where the murder of her friend Tayiba's sister by Klan violence years before still haunts her. But when her job sends her to cover a national Islamic conference in Indianapolis, she's back on familiar ground: Attending a concert by her brother's interfaith band The Clash of Civilizations, dodging questions from the "aunties" and "uncles," and running into the recently divorced Hakim everywhere.

Beautifully written and featuring an exuberant cast of characters, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf charts the spiritual and social landscape of Muslims in middle America, from five daily prayers to the Indy 500 car race. It is a riveting debut from an important new voice.