Join us to celebrate the launch of English PhD student Sara About Rashed's debut poetry collection Theories of Return!
This event will feature readings from Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry Allison Pitinii Davis and MFA student Misha Ponnuraju, followed by a Q&A moderated by NESA faculty Johanna Sellman.
About the Collection
Theories of Return is an urgent and unflinching poetry collection that resists both literal and literary erasure, asserting the right to exist. In these pages, Sara Abou Rashed’s voice does not ask permission but commands attention, bearing witness to exile while refusing silence. As much as the book honors her family’s displacement from Palestine to Syrian refugee camps and later to the U.S., it is ultimately collective rather than confessional, pressing outward to ask universal questions about the ethics of war, ownership, language, motherhood, and intimacy. Each poem operates as its own theory and attempt at return, binding abstraction to lived experience, and inherited history to the brutal clarity of the present moment. Formally daring and emotionally exacting, Theories of Return offers readers poetry that is intellectually rigorous, deeply human, and unafraid to speak.
Theories of Return is a searing and intimate poetry collection that reckons with exile, inheritance, and the impossible mathematics of going back. Moving between Gaza, Syria, Palestine, and the diasporic present, Sara Abou Rashed braids lyric intensity with political clarity, refusing abstraction in favor of lived consequence, bodies, borders, language, and grief that multiplies across generations. These poems examine what return means when home is inaccessible and memory is fragmented. Identity is forged under occupation and displacement, yet also insists on tenderness, dark humor, and fierce intelligence as modes of survival. At once formally inventive and emotionally direct, Theories of Return speaks to readers drawn to poetry that confronts history without sacrificing intimacy and that understands language itself as a site of resistance, mourning, and fragile hope.
About the Author
Sara Abou Rashed is a Palestinian poet, speaker, and creator of the one-woman show A Map of Myself. A former poetry fellow at the Vermont Studio Center, her work has been commended by the UK Forward Prize and was awarded the 2023 Hopwood Award for Poetry from the University of Michigan, where she earned her MFA. Sara’s writing appears in The Kenyon Review, The LA Review of Books, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Wales, the McGraw Hill Language Arts curriculum, and in the anthologies A Land with a People, Heaven Looks Like Us, and Ask the Night for a Dream, among others. Sara lives in Columbus, Ohio, where she's pursuing a PhD in English at The Ohio State University. Theories of Return is her debut collection.
This event is co sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures.