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Zeyn Joukhadar

Biography

Zeyn Joukhadar

Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of THE MAP OF SALT AND STARS and THE THIRTY NAMES OF NIGHT. He is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and of American Mensa. Joukhadar’s writing has appeared in Salon, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review and elsewhere, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. THE MAP OF SALT AND STARS was a 2018 Middle East Book Award winner in Youth Literature, a 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist in Historical Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. He has received fellowships from the Montalvo Arts Center, the Arab American National Museum, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Camargo Foundation, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

Zeyn Joukhadar

Books by Zeyn Joukhadar

The Thirty Names of Night
by Zeyn Joukhadar - Fiction

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. The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria. One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to painting the birds of North America. She famously and mysteriously disappeared more than 60 years before, but her journal contains proof that both his mother and Laila Z encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. In fact, Laila Z’s past is intimately tied to his mother’s --- and his grandmother’s --- in ways he never could have expected.

The Map of Salt and Stars
by Zeyn Joukhadar - Fiction

In the summer of 2011, just after Nour loses her father to cancer, her mother moves Nour and her sisters from New York City back to Syria to be closer to their family. In order to keep her father’s spirit as she adjusts to her new home, Nour tells herself their favorite story --- the tale of Rawiya, a 12th-century girl who disguised herself as a boy in order to apprentice herself to a famous mapmaker. When a stray shell destroys Nour’s house and almost takes her life, she and her family are forced to choose: stay and risk more violence, or flee across seven countries of the Middle East and North Africa in search of safety --- along the very route Rawiya and her mapmaker took 800 years before in their quest to chart the world.