Aunt Lute Brings Together Arab-American Women Writers

Over at Body on the Line, Marci Newman flags up the new Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, edited by her friend and mentor, which allowed her to suggest, successfully the inclusion

of several Arab American writers: Etel Adnan, Diana Abu-Jaber, Elmaz Abinader, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mohja Kahf, Nathalie Handal, and Suheir Hammad.

The anthology is worth celebrating for many reasons: it draws attention to what Mohja Kahf, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Arkansas, points out is

a growing body of Muslim American literature [that] has reached the critical mass where it might be considered its own genre, including works like “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” Khaled Hosseini’s novel “The Kite Runner” and a current best seller, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” by Mohsin Hamid.

The anthology also shows how widely that corpus ranges, across biography and memoir, popular fiction, experimental writing, essays, lyric poetry and spoken word.

And it's very welcome to see that Aunt Lute, a non-profit feminist press committed to publishing women of colour, is still making waves -- and they can ship direct to you internationally from their online store, one example of the amazing impact that the internet has had for small publishers.