Author’s Corner

Lenna Jawdat is a poet, writer, professor, and psychotherapist of Palestinian and Iraqi descent. Her writing, which explores trauma, identity and resilience, has appeared in journals such as Poet Lore, The Margins, Passenger’s Journal, Rogue Agent, among others, and in the 2025 Haymarket Anthology Heaven Looks Like Us. She was a 2021 Best of the Net nominee for her poem “Ode to the Psoas,” a 2022 Sundress Academy for the Arts summer resident, and has attended Tin House Workshop for poetry and creative nonfiction. She is also co-organizer of the poetry vigil series In Water and Light. Lenna received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in May 2024. She lives in DC with her partner and two cats.

A powerful act of remembrance and resistance, 70,000 transforms cultural erasure into a living, breathing archive of grief, memory, and hope.

70,000 is a visceral and inventive poetry collection inspired by the removal of approximately 70,000 books from Palestinian homes and private libraries before and during the events of 1948. Of those books, most have not been returned; about 6,000 remain housed in Israeli national collections, where they are largely inaccessible to Palestinians.

In response to this loss of cultural and intellectual heritage, Lenna Jawdat began handwriting the numbers one to 70,000, choosing to imagine each number as a book. Trained as a trauma therapist, she documented the emotional and physical experience of this ritual, tracing the grief, reverence, and endurance that surfaced through the process. This full-color book unfolds through three interwoven threads: the numbers themselves, reflections on the act of writing, and a personal and familial poetic narrative expressed in both image and verse. Together, they form a fragmented yet powerful archive—blending poetry, memoir, maps, documents, and collage.

70,000 is an embodied meditation on cultural displacement, memory, and resilience. What begins as a personal act of witnessing becomes a collective gesture toward remembrance, continuity, and the possibility of healing.

I imagine a world where Palestine is free: A re-origin story

I dream an oasis garden

enchanted by treetop jinn

I pluck ripe pomegranates off

branches, pry leather open to

collect palmfuls of little ruby

gems, glistening in the ominous

sun, a heavy yolk. I drink cool

clean water from a small pond

and when I bathe in it, time

slips off my softened skin

and I grow wings.

✈️

I fly direct to Jaffa, without fear of being detained. I greet the agent with a clumsy mouthful, hand-me-down language like a sweater I haven’t grown into yet. I walk through the streets, my intuition a donkey guiding me, until I’m standing in an orange grove, which is flourishing. There are young trees growing amidst the elders, their limbs awkward and joints knobby like newborn gazelle. The smell of citrus transports me, their sunny scent a carpet, to a time when trees never feared being maimed. I spread out on the grass and feast in the shade. Olives, figs & zaatar, tomatoes & cucumbers. A thermos of coffee. I tuck the olive pits in my pockets to plant later. I stroll through poppy fields & olive groves. The old trees tell me stories of the things they have witnessed. I scatter wildflower seeds as I go, over patches eroded. Bulldozers won’t bother them here. I bury the olive pits, prick fingertips on rose thorns, water the pits with droplets of my blood. They drink thirstily and awaken from the earth, thousand year old trees, unfolding from deep slumber, to tower over me.

“A precious poetess of Palestinian descent excavates the archeology of loss and erasure with a creative cri de coeur, meticulously researched and illustrated. She distills striking historical landmarks into a poignant tableau of pain.  Lenna Jawdat mines cultural symbols that sustain overlooked Palestinian identity and roots, weaving them into a novel format, breaking the wounds of invisibility and suppressed slights wide open. Now that the world is watching, this is a tender, honest and unique gem of a book.”” 

— Nora Boustany, former Middle East Washington Post correspondent and columnist

“Lenna Jawdat’s generous hybrid collection is part diary, part historical record, part ritual, and all ode. I feel deep gratitude for this love-act. Through her meditation Jawdat undertakes a transformative and laborious accounting which poses rippling questions: On stolen land, who counts? Who might never be accounted for? In the face of mammoth loss––of a people, of stories, of home––Jawdat chooses the powerful combination of ink and vulnerability. Slowly, steadfastly, she lays bare her inherited trauma alongside her “inherited resilience,” making legible what’s been invisibilized, vowing “I will document them somehow / Each number a tombstone / Something to return to.” Long after I’m done reading, I feel the reverberations of her hajj. Her markings evoke not just a graveyard, but a body returning to what it loves.” 

–– Shira Erlichman, author of Odes to Lithium

“I have rarely been so affected by a book, any book. I couldn’t put 70,000 down, so enraptured was I by Jawdat’s project and her multi-media approach to exploring unspeakable loss, heartache, bewilderment, exile, identity, family, love, and yes, hope. A truly original and remarkable work, seeking to remember what has been lost but also reaching towards what can be.” 

— Toni Thayer, Loganberry Books, Cleveland, OH”

“Lenna Jawdat has created a visual representation of cultural loss with this wholly original work of poetry. She has handwritten each number from 1 to 70,000 to represent the 70,000 books stolen from Palestinian homes by Zionist forces during the war in 1948. Side by side with poems and incorporated into artwork, the result is an extraordinary multi-media exploration of grief, memory, and hope.”

—Rebekah Rine, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, KS

“Jawdat has written a debut that will sit with you longer than it will take to have read it. This poetry will make you wonder how somewhere can be your home without the things that make it a home. Such striking prose and powerful visuals. None of us are free until we all are.”

—Ollie Mendez, Skylight Books, Los Angeles, CA