Arab Studies Journal XXV, no. 1 Spring 2017 is now available via Tadween Publishing! 

Hamza Lakhal was born in El Aaiún, capital of Western Sahara, eight years after the 1975 invasion of his country by Morocco. His first poetry collection, published in Arabic by L’Harmattan-RASD, talks of a young man’s passion for his violated but resistant homeland. Joanna Allan interviews Lakhal about the struggles of a poet and activist living under a brutal and repressive occupation.

Ali Issa, the author of Against All Odds: Voices of Popular Struggle in Iraq, is in the midst of a book tour that covers the United States, Lebanon, and United Kingdom.

Ali Issa, Against All Odds: Voices of Popular Struggle in Iraq. Washington, DC: Tadween Books, 2015. 

Collected from dozens of interviews with, and reports from, Iraqi feminists, labor organizers, environmentalists, and protest movement leaders, Against All Odds presents the unique voices of progressive Iraqi organizing on the ground. Dating back to 2003, with an emphasis on the 2011 upsurge in mobilization and hope as well as the subsequent embattled years, these voices belong to Iraqis asserting themselves as agents against multiple local, regional, and global forces of oppression. As Vijay Prashad notes in the foreword: "Other histories had been possible for Iraq, and indeed might yet be possible. The social basis for the Popular Movement to Save Iraq remains, even if in the shadows. It is the only force that could provide an alternative to the history of blood that stands before Iraq, the nest of bones, the sky of death."