Description:
Sleeping in the Courtyard brings together historically isolated writers in community--and invites readers to join them around the table to share in their memories, secrets, tears, and joys. Featuring poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and graphic work by emerging and well-established writers, this collection shines a light on works by a diverse group of contemporary Kurdish women and nonbinary writers living in Kurdistan and in diaspora.
Recognizing the complex web of physical and lingual displacement of the Kurdish people and celebrating the diverse tapestry of their stories, this collection presents work originally written in English and work translated from Kurdish dialects as well as from Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Swedish. A few works in Kurdish dialects appear alongside their translations, both in recognition of the experience of linguicide and to push against oppressive attempts to strip away Kurdish language.
Several works here explore the impact of the countless forms of militarized displacement, cultural destruction, and mass genocide that Kurds have endured. Other pieces illuminate Kurdish experiences of desire, friendship, empowerment, familial intricacies, and other topics spanning across universal human conditions. The writers in these pages take risks both in craft and content--and in some cases, just by daring to write and publish. What emerges in Sleeping in the Courtyard is the antithesis of erasure.
Review Quotes: "As a Palestinian American writer, I have long searched for reflections of my own fragmented lineage--this anthology gave me that and more. Sleeping in the Courtyard is more than an anthology--it is a reclamation. At once fierce and tender, the collection defies monolithic portrayals of Kurdish identity and instead renders a chorus of nuance, complexity, and lived truth. From the ruins of Halabja to the rooftops of Baghdad, from the quiet defiance of translation to the unbreakable thread of community, this anthology is a testament to the power of writing as cultural survival--and as revolutionary act. Curated with deep care and transnational breadth, Sleeping in the Courtyard invites readers into a space of shared breath, radical empathy, and collective remembrance. It is a door flung open. A night under the stars. A home built from story. This is not just a collection--it's a homecoming, a collective heartbeat, a defiant archive of what refuses to be erased."
--Etaf Rum, author of Evil Eye