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A Literary Celebration of Islamic Heritage Month

with Authors Eman Quotah and Majda Gama

Come celebrate contemporary Islamic literary culture with two local luminaries!

Come celebrate contemporary Islamic literary culture with two local luminaries!

Join us as the Montgomery County Public Library hosts celebrated authors Eman Quotah and Majda Gama in conversation about their works. Quotah will discuss her new visceral and captivating horror debut, The Night is Not for You, and her earlier family saga set in Saudi Arabia and the United States, Bride of the Sea. Gama will engage around her body of poetry, including the Winner of the 2023 Wandering Aengus Press prize, In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls. It is bound to be a captivating conversation that you will not want to miss!

Authors will be selling copies of their books onsite, and their works are available through the MCPL catalog. 

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Eman Quotah is the author of The Night Is Not For You (Run For It/Orbit US and Wildfire/Orbit UK, 2025) and Bride of the Sea (Tin House, 2021), winner of the Arab American Book Award for Fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, USA Today, Literary Hub, and other publications. She’s been awarded fellowships from MacDowell and Hedgebrook and grants from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County.

When she’s not writing fiction or essays, Eman is a communications consultant. She’s also the secretary of the board for RAWI, which represents writers of Southwest Asian and North African heritage. She lives with her family near Washington, D.C.

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Majda Gama is a Beirut-born, Arab American poet based in the Washington, DC area. She is the author of In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls, winner of the Wandering Aengus Press award for poetry, and The Call of Paradise, selected by Diane Seuss as the winner of the 2022 Two Sylvias Chapbook Prize.

She has read her poetry and contributed to panels at the PEN/World Voices festival in New York City, the Lit Crawl in San Francisco, and Split This Rock in Washington, DC. Her poetry has appeared nationally, and internationally, in journals such as AGNI, The Adroit Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cordite, Four Way Review, The Fairy Tale Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Nimrod, The Offing, Ploughshares, POETRY, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, TriQuarterly, Wildness, and We Call to the Eye & the Night, (Persea, 2023), an anthology of love poetry by Arab Anglophone poets.

Majda is a multiple Pushcart, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net nominee, a runner up to the RHINO Founders Prize, a finalist in the Neil Shepard prize, and a finalist in the Hayden’s Ferry Review inaugural Poetry Prize. Her honors include the Graybeal-Gowen award for Virgina poets, a Gregory Djanikian scholar award from Adroit, and a special mention from the Pushcart Prize editors for important work published by a small press in 2024.

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This program is recommended for adults 18+.

Check out all the events coming up at MCPL in our calendar of events!

Including: Stories That Connect Us: With Local Author Hena Khan

Questions about this program? Contact the branch at 240-773-9420.

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Library Program Attendance (both virtual and in the branch) is limited to participants within the suggested age range of the program. Children attending an MCPL program under the age of 8 must be accompanied by an adult. Adults attending a program intended for children must have an accompanying child.

If you plan to attend with a group of ten or more, please contact the branch at least one week before the program to discuss how your group might be accommodated.

Accommodation Requests

People who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing should request English-language captioning or sign-language interpretation at least five days before the library-sponsored program they plan to attend. Contact the Assistant Facilities and Accessibility Program Manager at 240-777-0002 with all other accommodation requests.

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