Kareem James Abu-Zeid on No One Will Know You Tomorrow: Selected Poems of Najwan Darwish
City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco welcomed Kareem James Abu-Zeid to read his translations of Najwan Darwish’s poetry and celebrate the release of the collection No One Will Know You Tomorrow: Selected Poems, 2014-2024 (Yale University Press). He was joined in conversation by Zeina Hashem Beck, author of O.
About
Born in Jerusalem in 1978, Najwan Darwish is one of the most important poets of the Arabic-speaking world. This definitive collection, which draws from five volumes published in Arabic as well as new unpublished work, brings to English-language readers a sweeping trove of Darwish’s most powerful and urgent poetry of the last decade.
In spare lyric verse, Darwish testifies to the brutal and intimate traumas of war, the anguished fatigue of waking up each morning in an occupied land, and the immeasurable toll of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While anchored in the geography of Palestine, his poetry also explores the rich artistic inheritance of the Arabic-speaking world, moving between regions, landscapes, and eras, from the glories of medieval Granada to the rippling shores of contemporary Haifa. In dialogue with poets, philosophers, and seekers from many different traditions, Darwish’s verse pulses with spiritual longing and a sense of battered, disoriented wonder—a witness to both the atrocities we visit upon one another and the miracle that we are here at all.
No One Will Know You Tomorrow is a tribute to the indomitability of the human spirit: its sensitive attunement to beauty and its endurance in the face of unspeakable tragedy.
Kareem James Abu-Zeid, PhD, is an Egyptian-American translator of poets and novelists from across the Arab world who translates from Arabic, French, and German. He has received the Sarah Maguire Prize, PEN Center USA’s translation prize, Poetry Magazine’s translation prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, and an NEA translation grant, among other honors, and has twice been a finalist for the PEN America Translation Prize (once in poetry and once in prose). He is also the author of the book The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy: Poetry as Spiritual Practice. He lives in the countryside just outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her collection of 40 palindromic sonnets, titled This Was Supposed to Be About Beauty, is forthcoming from Penguin Poets in Spring 2027. She’s the winner of the 2023 Arab American Book Award for Poetry for O, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Literary Hub and The New York Public Library. Her work has appeared in Lithub, The Nation, and LARB, among others. She’s the co-editor, with Hala Alyan, of We Call to the Eye and the Night, an anthology of love poems by writers of Arab heritage. After a lifetime in Lebanon and a decade in Dubai, Zeina recently moved to the Bay Area.