Springfield - Arab American Heritage Month

Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. He has been unable to paint since his mother's ghost has begun to visit him each evening. As his grandmother's sole caretaker, he spends his days cooped up in their apartment, avoiding his neighborhood masjid, his estranged sister, and even his best friend (who also happens to be his longtime crush)....

"In Invasive species, Marwa Helal's searing politically charged poems touch on our collective humanity and build new pathways for empathy, etching themselves into memory. This work centers on urgent themes in our cultural landscape, creating space for unseen victims of discriminatory foreign (read: immigration) policy: migrants, refugees--the displaced. Helal transfers lived experiences of dislocation and relocation onto the reader by obscuring borders...

"Roya is a dreamy, idealistic teenager living in 1953 Tehran who, amidst the political upheaval of the time, finds a literary oasis in kindly Mr. Fakhri's neighborhood book and stationery shop. She always feels safe in his dusty store, overflowing with fountain pens, shiny ink bottles, and thick pads of soft writing paper. When Mr. Fakhri, with a keen instinct for a budding romance, introduces Roya to his other favorite customer -- handsome Bahman,...

"After being dumped at the beginning of freshman year, Iranian-American Parvin Mohammadi sets out to win the ultimate date to Homecoming"-- Provided by publisher. If Parvin Mohammadi can get Matty Fumero to ask her to homecoming, she's positive it will erase all the awful and embarrassing feelings He Who Will Not Be Named left her with after the summer. Since being herself has not worked for her in the past, she decides to be the girl who finally...

Nora Guerraoui, a jazz composer, returns home to a small town in the Mojave after hearing that her father, owner of a popular restaurant there, has been killed in a suspicious hit-and-run car accident. Nora develops an intimacy with Jeremy, an Iraq war veteran. Along with the widow Maryam; Efrain, an immigrant witness to the accident; Coleman, the police investigator, and Driss--the dead man himself-- Nora explores secrets and hypocrisies in a society...