2018 Middle East Book Award - Youth Literature Award. Honors and awards Won The Map of Salt and Stars In Anappara, Deepa Soomro, Taymour (eds.). "Catching the Light: Reclaiming Opera as a Trans Arab". His first novel, The Map of Salt and Stars, was published in 2018. Prior to pursuing writing full time, he worked as a biomedical research scientist. Joukhadar is originally from New York City and has a PhD in Pathobiology from Brown University. Zeyn Joukhadar is nonbinary and uses he/him/they pronouns. Joukhadar is the recipient of the 2021 Stonewall Book Awards and the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction for The Thirty Names of Night. I’ve played with the visual in both my novels: The Map of Salt and Stars features shape poems, while the protagonist’s deadname in The Thirty Names of Night is scribbled out by hand.Zeyn Joukhadar is a Syrian American writer. Apsara Engine, which won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Comics, blew my mind, not only because seeing trans people of color loving each other and using their own blood to draw blueprints of fantastical cities and radical futures brought me to tears, but also because of Som’s masterful disruption of linear narrative and her lush, dreamlike illustrations.Īs a novelist, my love for the novel’s form has (perhaps paradoxically) always made me curious about what becomes possible when the page is freed from the tyranny of the written word. 
The first time I picked it up, I finished it in a single sitting. I love the novels and stories whose gaze itself is queer, in the sense that they open my mind and heart to a more expansive imagining of what the world is and can be-while also allowing their queer and trans characters to have full, three-dimensional lives that don’t revolve around tragedy, or around queerness alone.īishakh Som’s graphic short story collection Apsara Engine is, without a doubt, one of those books. Many of the books that have made my life feel most possible as a queer, trans, Arab, and Muslim person have been works that look at queerness and transness almost from the corner of their eye.
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