Haunting As Inheritance: Hannah Lillith Assadi and Noor Naga in Conversation with Francisco Robles and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

Haunting As Inheritance: Hannah Lillith Assadi and Noor Naga in Conversation with Francisco Robles and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

In Person & Live On Zoom

A conversation about belonging, place, and displacement that will take us on a tour de force from Cairo, to the Sonoran Desert, to the gritty streets of New York City. 

Hannah Lillith Assadi

Hannah Lillith Assadi is the author of Sonora (Soho 2017), which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her second novel The Stars Are Not Yet Bells (Riverhead 2022) was named a New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022. Her third novel Paradiso 17, inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2026. She teaches fiction at the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute. In 2018, she was named a ‘5 under 35’ honoree by the National Book Foundation.

Noor Naga

Noor Naga is an Alexandrian writer who was born in Philadelphia, raised in Dubai and studied in Toronto. Her work has been published in Granta, LitHub, Poetry, BOMB, The Walrus, The Common, The Offing, and more. In 2017, she won the Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry and in 2019 she won both the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award and the DISQUIET Fiction Prize. Her verse-novel Washes, Prays was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2020. Set in Toronto, this genre-bending work follows an immigrant woman’s romantic relationship with a married man and her ensuing crisis of faith. It won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, as well as the Arab American Book Award, and was listed in the Best Canadian Poetry of 2020 by CBC.

Set in Cairo in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, Naga’s debut novel, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, is a dark romance examining the gaps in North American identity politics, especially when exported overseas. In our globalized twenty-first-century world, this novel exposes the new faces (and races) of empire, asking who profiteers off of failed revolutions and, more importantly, who gets to write of the martyrs? If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English won the Graywolf Press Africa Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and has been shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. It was released in April 2022 to rave reviews from Kirkus, Chicago Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, the CBC, and The New York Times, which called it an “exhilarating debut.”

She divides her time between Cairo and Toronto where she teaches.

Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance, launched by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, is a research collective and lecture series co-sponsored by the College of Arts and Letters, Creative Writing Program, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, The Graduate School, the Institute for Social Concerns, and the Department of English. at the University of Notre Dame, and housed at the Initiative on Race and Resilience, directed by Mark Sanders, Professor of English and Africana Studies. The series focuses on contemporary literature, film, and visual art that has been shaped by revolutionary and resistance movements, decolonization, migration, class and economic warfare, communal and state-sanctioned violence, and human rights violations. We aim to theorize new modes of contemporary literary and artistic resistance across national borders and to amplify the voices of scholars, artists, and writers of color whose lived experience is instrumental in forging new alliances across formal, linguistic and national boundaries.

This event is hosted by the Initiative on Race and Resilience and co-sponsored by the MFA Program in Creative Writing, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, The Graduate School, the Institute for Social Concerns, and the Department of English.