We are proud to announce the winners of the 2020 Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Scholarship

Alf Mabrook to our scholarship winners, listed below!

Their submissions, along with other Palestinian writers and artists ages 18-25, will be published in the upcoming Ghassan Kanafani Anthology, which you can order online soon!

First Place: Tamer Shalabi

Tamer Shalabi is an 18-year old Palestinian American artist and aspiring architect who was born in Arcadia, California and now lives in Dallas, Texas. His family is from Al-Mazraa Al Sharqiya.

Across all of Ghassan Kanafani’s work, by capturing Palestinians’ stories, he establishes a personal relationship between the reader and the subject of the story. Throughout my pieces, I take some of my own experiences and the experiences of other Palestinians I know in order to capture our lives in diaspora. We are caught in the in-between --we are neither here nor there but instead are in a grey area between inaccurate representation and common misunderstanding. Storytelling is an extremely powerful tool that can reach and resonate with people across lived experience and borders; I’m sure Ghassan Kanafani thought the same.

SECOND PLACE: Maysam Ghani

Maysam Ghani is a Muslim spoken-word poet with Palestinian and Syrian roots, dwelling on the unceded lands of Turtle Island. She graduated with a degree in Global Development Studies and is in her Bachelor of Education year, with specializations in First Nations, Metis and Inuit studies, and History at Queen’s University. Maysam is dedicated to anti-colonial social justice movements and often explores these politics in her writing. She writes poetry that explores questions of home, faith, displacement and healing through her familial and ancestral connections.

You can find a selection of her published pieces in the forthcoming academic journal New Sociology: Journal of Critical Praxis (2020), in addition to the Queen’s Journal of Indigenous Studies (2019), Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Scholarship Anthology (2019) and Collective Reflections (2018). She was a featured poet at the Canadian Spoken Word Festival in 2019, and she has performed her poetry in two productions of Down There. Catch her reciting poems at your local Palestine solidarity action!

THIRD PLACE: Mariam Abdallah Masud

Mariam Masud is a Palestinian writer from the village of Al-Mughayer residing in Chicago. Mariam has recently completed her Masters in English, specializing in themes of displacement and the human condition in an ever globalizing and neocolonial world. As a Palestinian raised in the states and who also lived in Palestine for eight years, much of her writing focuses on how the Palestinian narrative and struggle are mapped in this global order and predominantly Western discourse. Her ultimate goal is to forbid the white gaze that is so prevalent in global literature, and to write stories that showcase genuine and raw Palestinian voices who are unafraid of criticizing or calling out the colonial west.