Mosab Abu Toha & Emet North: The Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize Winners Reading & Panel
Join BPL Presents in celebrating winners Emet North and Mosab Abu Toha at our annual BPL Book Prize Winners Reading & Panel. North and Abu Toha will be in conversation with Ken Chen at the Brooklyn Book Festival.
Each fall, BPL honors outstanding works of nonfiction and fiction/poetry. Selected by librarians and staff, who draw on their broad knowledge of literature and the many populations they serve, the BPL Book Prize recognizes writing that captures the spirit of Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize was established in 2015 by the Brooklyn Eagles, young, engaged Brooklynites who are passionate about the library and work to engage new patrons.
Past winners include Kaveh Akbar, Blair L.M. Kelley, Catherine Lacey, Lamya H, Xochitl Gonzalez, and Threa Almontaser.
This is an official 2025 Brooklyn Book Festival event.
PARTICIPANTS
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist from Gaza. His first collection of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and won the Palestine Book Award, the American Book Award, and the Walcott Poetry Prize. Abu Toha is also the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award, a James Beard Award and a Pulitzer Prize in Commentary for his essays on Gaza in The New Yorker. Photo credit Mohamed Mahdy
Emet North has lived in a dozen states over the past decade and has no fixed residence, though they feel most at home in the mountains. In previous lives, they worked in an observational cosmology lab on a grant from NASA, taught snowboarding in Montana, researched Lie algebras, led wine tastings, waited tables, trained horses, and wrote a thesis on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. They translate from Spanish to English with a particular focus on queer and trans voices and are always looking for new projects. https://www.emetnorth.com/
Ken Chen is an Assistant Professor and the Associate Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College of Columbia University. His next book, tentatively titled Death Star, is forthcoming and follows his journey to the underworld to rescue his father and his encounters there with those destroyed by colonialism. His poetry collection, Juvenilia, was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Louise Glück, who wrote, “Like only the best poets, Ken Chen makes with his voice a new category.”
