Kōrero
Writing into Silence: Hasib Hourani x Cathy Linh Che

“rock flight is relentlessly potent,” writes Korean American poet Don Mee Choi about Hasib Hourani’s debut book, a personal and historical narrative of Palestine’s occupation. At once claustrophobic and unsettlingly exposed, this book-length poem seeks new forms of language to articulate this ongoing horror and the ongoing resistance.

Hasib speaks with writer and artist Cathy Linh Che about writing into the wound, explorations with form, and the state of literature in Australia and the US.

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Presented as part of the Asian American Literature Festival.

Hasib Hourani is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor, arts worker and educator living on unceded Wangal Country. Growing up across the Gulf, Hasib returned to so-called Australia in 2016 and began writing and publishing work in 2019. Hasib is a 2020 recipient of The Wheeler Centre's Next Chapter Scheme and his 2021 essay, 'when we blink', was shortlisted for The LIMINAL & Pantera Press Nonfiction prize and is published in their 2022 anthology, Against Disappearance. Hasib's debut book rock flight will be published with Giramondo (AU) in September 2024, Prototype (UK) in October 2024 and New Directions (US) in April 2025.

Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, the co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books). She is working on a creative nonfiction manuscript, and a short documentary on her parents’ experiences as refugees who played extras on Apocalypse Now. Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY.