UPCOMING BOOK LAUNCHES
2027
Los Angeles… Chicago… watch this space for updates.
2026
NEW YORK
Saturday, December 12, 2026, 6.30-8.00 PM
LAUNCH of The Bee Kingdom, a memoir by Joy Amina Garnett. Jointly organized and presented by Gaudy Boy and the Evergreen Review. Featuring Joy Amina Garnett, Dale Peck, and Arthur Fournier
LOCATION: Flux IV, 56-21 2nd St, Long Island City, NY 11101 [map]
RSVP: Jee at jkoh@singaporeunbound.org
Please join Joy Amina Garnett in conversation with Dale Peck and Arthur Fournier to celebrate the New York launch of her long-awaited memoir, The Bee Kingdom, to be released by Gaudy Boy in January 2027. They will discuss the evolving manuscript vis-à-vis long years of archival research, and some of the dilemmas encountered when unearthing long-held secrets from family archives. Conversation and readings will be followed by a Q&A and book signing.
Joy Amina Garnett is an Arab American writer and visual artist from New York, now living in Los Angeles. She spent her undergraduate years studying Arabic at McGill University and the American University in Cairo. Garnett began writing regularly for artnet magazine with the 1999 launch of her column, “Into Africa.” Since then, her essays have appeared in Harper’s, Arab Urbanism Magazine, Art21 Magazine, M/E/A/N/I/N/G, and in the chapters of several books. Her short stories have been published in Rusted Radishes, Evergreen Review, Ping-Pong, Nashville Review, ellipse, and elsewhere. In 2024, she became a fellow at Yaddo to work on The Bee Kingdom, an advance excerpt of which was Longlisted for the 2024 First Pages Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Garnett has served as the Art Director of the Evergreen Review since 2019. The Bee Kingdom is her first book.
Dale Peck is the author of fourteen books in a variety of genres. His short fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in more than fifty publications including the New York Times, Harper’s, and the Baffler. Peck is the Editor-in-Chief of the Evergreen Review and has been since its revival in 2017. Peck is a member of PEN and the National Book Critics Circle. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two O. Henry Awards, a Pushcart Prize, and the inaugural Lambda Literary Award for Young Adult fiction, and was named to the Out 100 list in 2010. Born on Long Island, Peck spent most of childhood in Kansas. He was educated at Drew University, and now lives in New York City with his husband, Lou Peralta, and their two cats.
Arthur Fournier is an independent broker specializing in twentieth-century archives and manuscripts. Over the past decade, he has placed significant collections in the arts, letters, and sciences with institutions including the Smithsonian, the Getty, Columbia University, Harvard, New York University, Penn State, Princeton, Yale, and the New York Public Library. His recent clients include the Malcolm McLaren estate, the Arthur Russell estate, The Wooster Group, Mudd Club co-founder Steve Mass, and Leonard Abrams, founder of the East Village Eye. A member of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA), Fournier also buys and sells rare books, serials, and ephemera across widely varying fields and genres.
PAST TALKS
2025
Hosted by American University in Cairo Press
February 11, 2025
The Many Lives of Ibrahim Nagui: A Journey with my Grandfather, by Samia Mehrez
The American University in Cairo Press presents a virtual book discussion of The Many Lives of Ibrahim Nagui: A Journey with my Grandfather, a multi-generational literary memoir that sheds new light on one of the Arab world’s most renowned Romantic poets through the eyes of his granddaughter, award-winning author Samia Mehrez. Mehrez, the granddaughter of Apollo poet Ibrahim Nagui, in conversation with Joy Amina Garnett, granddaughter of another Apollo poet and Apollo magazine‘s founder, Ahmed Zaky Abushady. The discussion is moderated by ArabLit editor, translator, and literary critic Marcia Lynx Qualey. The Many Lives of Ibrahim Nagui: A Journey with my Grandfather, by Samia Mehrez, is now available in English, translated by Eleanor Ellis: more info
Speakers
Samia Mehrez (author) is professor emerita of Arabic literature in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations and founder of the Center for Translation Studies at the American University in Cairo (2009–2021). She is the author of Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction (AUC Press, 1994) and Egypt’s Culture Wars (2008), and the editor of The Literary Atlas of Cairo, The Literary Life of Cairo, and Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir (AUC Press, 2010, 2011, 2012).
Joy Amina Garnett (panelist) is an artist and writer in Los Angeles. Her forthcoming memoir, The Bee Kingdom, charts her life-long search for her late maternal grandfather Ahmed Zaky Abushady (1892-1955), a central figure of 20th century Egyptian romantic poetry.
Marcia Lynx Qualey (moderator) is the founding editor of ArabLit and ArabLit Quarterly and co-host of the BULAQ podcast. She is the translator of Sonia Nimr’s time-traveling Thunderbird trilogy and Haya Saleh’s YA novel Wild Poppies.
2020
Hosted by Middle East Librarians Association (MELA)
October, 19 2020
The Story of the Abushady Archive, MELA Notes, 2020
The story of how the collection found a home at the Archives and Special Collections of NYU Abu Dhabi Library in the midst of a global pandemic. 19 October: Recovering Hidden/Historical/Special Collections. Conference theme: “Pandemic, Crisis, and Cultural Institutions: The Intersection of Library Work with COVID-19 and Other Crises.”
Archived Talks
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