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Zaina Arafat

Biography

Zaina Arafat

Zaina Arafat is a Palestinian American writer. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications including   The New York Times, Granta, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, VICE   and NPR. She holds an MA in international affairs from Columbia University and an MFA from the University of Iowa, and is a recipient of the Arab Women/Migrants from the Middle East fellowship at Jack Jones Literary Arts. She grew up between the United States and the Middle East and currently lives in Brooklyn.

Zaina Arafat

Books by Zaina Arafat

You Exist Too Much
by Zaina Arafat - Fiction

On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgment will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother’s response only intensifies a sense of shame: “You exist too much,” she tells her daughter. Told in vignettes that flash between the U.S. and the Middle East --- from New York to Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine --- Zaina Arafat’s debut novel traces her protagonist’s progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer.