In light of recent events in Palestine—and more specifically, the Poetry Foundation’s censorship of pro-Palestinian voices and refusal to take a public stance on the genocidal war taking place in Gaza—Mizna makes this statement regarding our financial relationship with this funder. 

Mizna was recently awarded a Poetry Foundation grant for $35,000, and the Poetry Foundation has funded Mizna since 2021. During the grant renewal process, poets Summer Farah and Omar Sakr (both Mizna authors), Noor Hindi, and Mizna Executive Editor George Abraham co-wrote a letter calling for individual poets to boycott the Poetry Foundation. The letter gained thousands of signatures and was covered by major outlets such as LitHub.

Mizna supports this boycott and encourages our community of writers to continue supporting the boycott. The Poetry Foundation has not responded to the letter’s demands, and furthermore, has attempted to undermine such protests with accusations of “misinformation.” We call on the Poetry Foundation to apologize and heed the demands of the boycott letter.

“We strongly condemn the Poetry Foundation’s choice to censor artists and disregard their calls for political clarity,” said Executive and Artistic Director of Mizna, Lana Salah Barkawi. “More than 20,000 civilians have died and nearly 2 million people have been displaced in Gaza. This is not a moment to stay silent. We want to be clear: we will use these Poetry Foundation funds to directly support Palestinians and other writers affected by rising anti-Palestinian censorship in the US.” 

Funds received from the Poetry Foundation will be used as follows: 

• Directly paying Palestinians, especially those in Gaza who are most affected by recent genocidal actions by the Israeli military.
• Continuing to publish work in print and online by Palestinians and other pro-Palestine allies who have put their livelihoods on the line to condemn the genocide in Gaza and support Palestinian liberation.
• Funding ongoing readings, installations, residencies, and other cultural programs centering Palestine.
• Continuing to support political actions for Palestinian liberation, both locally in the Twin Cities and nationally.

“Institutions like the Poetry Foundation cannot exist without poets,” said Mizna Executive Editor George Abraham. “It is unconscionable that the Poetry Foundation remains silent, especially as several poets, including Poetry’s own contributor Mosab Abu Toha, are abducted, imprisoned, or even murdered, by the Israeli state. How are artists supposed to work with an organization that doesn’t stand by its values?”

While the Poetry Foundation censors pro-Palestinian voices, Mizna will continue to support artists, writers, and filmmakers in making and presenting work that proposes political liberation and self-determination, especially in Palestine. Decolonization is not a metaphor.

For questions or further comment please contact:

Lamia Abukhadra
Art and Communications Director, Mizna
lamia@mizna.org

George Abraham
Executive Editor, Mizna
george@mizna.org

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Mizna has been named as a recipient of the prestigious Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. Founded in 2018, the prize’s purpose is to recognize excellence and to empower outstanding nonprofit publications to develop and implement ideas that will have a transformative impact and help sustain their works as champions of writers. As part of The Whiting Foundation’s new triennial model, Mizna will receive support in the form of $20,000 in grants for 2023, and matching grant support of the same amount in 2024 and 2025 to encourage our ongoing individual giving efforts.

The judges’ citation for the prize states: “Mizna is an absolute gem of a journal: tightly edited, gorgeously curated, and visually striking. Care and craft float off its pages of beautifully laid-out poetry and lovingly printed images. Mizna is both a grassroots community organization and an esteemed international artistic platform, furthering important intergenerational dialogue within the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) diaspora and showcasing thrilling new literature.” 

In addition to financial support, Mizna will participate in development workshops with the Whiting Foundation, alongside the rest of the 2023 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize cohort, which includes Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, Orion, Oxford American, and The Paris Review. Past winners of the prize have also included friends of Mizna, such as former partner The Margins with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. The prize has acknowledged both print and digital literary journals of various sizes, geographic locations, and organizational histories. Read more about the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize cohorts here. 

Support from the Whiting Foundation funds ongoing initiatives, including our forthcoming Cinema Issue guest-edited by Palestinian filmmaker and writer Saeed Taji Farouky, the literary festival Mizna + RAWIFest, which will take place as a hybrid event in Minneapolis this October, and recent staff expansions such as the hiring of Deputy Director Ellina Kevorkian and Executive Editor George Abraham. Approaching our twenty-fifth year anniversary, we are honored to be recognized for our caring curation of intergenerational SWANA literary conversations, and for our innovative print practices which we hope to continue developing. Our most recent issues of Mizna include Myth and Memory; the Black SWANA Issue, guest-edited by Safia Elhillo; the Experimental Issue, guest-edited by Tarik Dobbs; our Etel Adnan Tribute issue, and more.

Audiences can stay up to date with Mizna news and support us by subscribing to our journal, donating to support our ongoing programs, and following us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

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KEVORKIAN’S EXTENSIVE EXPERIENCE COMES AT A PERIOD OF CRITICAL ORGANIZATIONAL GROWTH AT MIZNA

Mizna is pleased to announce the appointment of Ellina Kevorkian to the position of Deputy Director, following an international search. Kevorkian recently served as Franconia Sculpture Park’s Director of Artist Residency Programs and previously as the Artistic Director for Artist Residency Programs at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Kevorkian brings her administrative expertise to Mizna at a vital moment of growing organizational capacity made possible in part by a multi-year Regional Cultural Treasure Award from the McKnight Foundation, part of the Ford Foundation’s America’s Cultural Treasures initiative. As Deputy Director, Kevorkian will be an organizational leader, working to optimize organizational and programming operations at Mizna while serving as a thought partner to the Executive and Artistic Director, Lana Salah Barkawi. 

“I couldn’t be more honored to join such a respected organization with a far-reaching impact on so many creative communities—Mizna is a one-of-a-kind cultural arts organization doing important work in promoting contemporary SWANA voices. I’m looking forward to continuing my mission of supporting creative expression and increasing SWANA’s presence in the arts.” —Ellina Kevorkian 

“Ellina Kevorkian brings to Mizna deep, dynamic experience in the arts sector as well as an incredible enthusiasm and support for art, ideas, and artists themselves. As Mizna approaches its twenty-fifth anniversary next year, the addition of a seasoned leader to the team represents an exciting moment of growth and possibility that helps secure our future and our ability to be a sustained space for SWANA artists. As an Armenian American, Ellina’s joining also highlights Mizna’s commitment to an expansive SWANA community.” —Lana Salah Barkawi

About Ellina Kevorkian

Ellina Kevorkian is an Armenian American artist, curator, and director of artist residency programs with a twenty-year career advocating for art and artists informed by her experience in interdisciplinary and contemporary visual arts and performance. Since becoming an artist residency director, she’s been at the fore of envisioning artist residencies as they evolve to professionalize along with new generations of artists while advocating for artist care and sustainability. Kevorkian is recognized nationally for organizing forward-thinking residencies as new curatorial platforms, working with emerging to mid-career artists in multiple disciplines such as visual arts, performance, writing, social practice, and experimental sound. Her thematic residencies centered social justice concerns bringing like-minded cohorts together for topics such as Sci-Fi & the Human Condition, Art, Empathy & Ethos, and Authority & Visibility in Public Space.

Before her time as a residency director, Kevorkian’s curatorial practice spanned experimental works and mediums investigating human vulnerability and self-interrogation. Her exhibition for the Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Time Initiative, Recollecting Performance, was widely regarded as one of the first exhibitions examining costumes and garments worn by conceptual performance artists. Commissioned artists like Senga Nengudi, Eleanor Antin, Suzanne Lacy, Barbara T. Smith, Ed Bereal, and Paul McCarthy recorded memories of their 1970s and early 80s performances alongside what they wore using memory to recall the performance and to contextualize the pressing issues of the times. 

As an artist, Kevorkian has participated in solo and group exhibitions, showing work at Western Project, Mark Moore Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, The Center for the Art of Performance at the University of California Los Angeles, as well as having been included in the Southern California Council of the National Museum of Women in the Arts–sponsored retrospective Multiple Vantage Points: Southern California Women Artists, 1980–2006. Her work has been written about in the LA Times, the LA Weekly, ArtForum, ArtPulse, and Artnet, and was written about by Sunjata Iyengar in Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies—Gender, Race, and Sexuality, published by Routledge Press.

Kevorkian has been a guest of universities, conferences, and convenings, participating in nationwide discourse and panel reviews for significant institutions such as The National Endowment for the Arts, The Pew Center for Cultural Heritage, Creative Capital Foundation, 

The Harpo Foundation, The Alliance for Artist Communities, as well as College Art Association . She was named a Portland Emerging Arts Leader affiliated with the Emerging Leaders Network, a program of Americans for the Arts, and a Mayor-appointed Arts Commissioner for the City of Minneapolis. She holds an MFA from Claremont Graduate University and an MA in curatorial practice in performance from Wesleyan University. 

About Mizna

Mizna is a critical platform for contemporary literature, film, art, and cultural production centering the work of Arab and Southwest Asian, and North African (SWANA) artists. For more than twenty years, Mizna has been creating a decolonized cultural space to reflect the expansiveness of our community and to foster exchange, examine ideas, and engage audiences in meaningful art.
Named City Page’s Nonprofit of the Year in 2020 and a Regional Cultural Treasure in 2021, we publish Mizna, an award-winning SWANA lit and art journal; produce the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival, the largest and longest-running Arab film fest in the Midwest; and offer classes, readings, performances, public art, and community events, having featured over 400 local and global writers, filmmakers, and artists.

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WATCH THE LAUNCH HERE

Mizna launches its summer 2021 issue, Mizna 22.1, featuring readings by Hassan Saby, Maya Salameh, Nardine Taleb and Rania Mamoun.

This virtual reading takes place Sunday, October 17, 2021 at 5pm CT.

ORDER MIZNA 22.1

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Hassan Saby is the manifestation of our community’s collective homophobia. 

Maya Salameh is a poet fellow of the William Male Foundation and a 2016 National Student Poet, America’s highest honor for youth poets. She is the winner of the 2022 Etel Adnan Prize, through which her debut poetry collection, HOW TO MAKE AN ALGORITHM IN THE MICROWAVE, will be published in 2022. Her poems have appeared in The Rumpus, Asian American Writer’s Workshop, and The Brooklyn Review, among others. Maya is the author of rooh (Paper Nautilus Press 2020).

Nardine Taleb is an Egyptian-American writer, speech therapist, and Prose Editor of the online literary journal Gordon Square Review based in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has been published in Hobart, Rattle, The Commuter, Frontier Poetry, and others. You can find her at the following social media platforms: Twitter: @nardineta / IG: @nardineta

Rania Mamoun is a Sudanese writer and activist. Mamoun has published two novels in Arabic, Flash Akhdar (Green Flash) and Ibn-al-Shams (Son of the Sun). She is the author of the short story collection 13 Sharen Min Isharaq al Shams (Thirteen Months of Sunrise), which was translated to English by Elisabeth Jaquette, published by Comma Press in 2019, and shortlisted for the 2020 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Mamoun’s writing has appeared in English translation in Banipal Magazine, Words Without Borders, and the collections The Book of Khartoum and Banthology, both from Comma Press, and in French translation by Xavier Luffin for Magellan & Cie’s Nouvelles du Soudan. Rania Mamoun was a Former editor of Al Thaqafi’s culture Magazine and she was frequent contributor to Al Doha Magazine, Mamoun has recently published articles and, poems and short stories in Shenandoah Literary Journal, Al Baeed Magazine, Kikah Magazine, Al Araby UK, and Al Democrati, a Sudanese newspaper. 

ABOUT MIZNA 22.1

The summer issue of Mizna’s award-winning literary journal, Mizna: SWANA Literature + Art, features a dynamic group of authors—many of whom are new to the Mizna community—engaging with and expanding the social realities relevant to the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) experience and community. 

In this issue, Mizna reveals a change to our subtitle, now SWANA Literature + Art, from the previous, Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America. This comes as a result of deep, ongoing internal dialog about decolonizing and being more expansive in the framing of ourselves and our communities. In place of a foreword, the issue features reflections from Mizna’s community about what the shift to the term SWANA represents. 

Contributors to Mizna 22.1 are: Andrea Abi-Karam, Philipe AbiYouness, leena aboutaleb, Jessica Abughattas, Sarah Ghazal Ali, Arwa Alsamarae, Yasmine Ameli, Sara Elkamel, Mariam Gomaa, Farah Hamade, Kaleem Hawa, Nofel, Nour Kamel, Rania Mamoun, Yara Omer, Hassan Saby, Lubna Safi, Maya Salameh, Nardine Taleb, Alene Terzian-Zeitounian, and Sumeja Tulic. The issue also features visual art from renowned Moroccan modernist Mohamed Melehi.

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Mizna is thrilled to announce that our literary journal has won a FIRECRACKER AWARD from the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP)! This award is given annually to celebrate books and magazines that make a significant contribution to our literary culture and the publishers that strive to introduce important voices to readers far and wide.

Since our organization’s founding in 1999, Mizna has published 38 issues of Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America, presenting more than 350 authors and 32 visual artists, offering an intentional space to reflect the expansiveness of our community and to foster exchange, examine ideas, and engage audiences in meaningful art. We are so pleased to have the critical work we have done for and with our community celebrated on this scale.

LEARN MORE

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McKnight, Ford, Bush, and Jerome Foundations Create New Initiative for Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American-Led Arts Organizations

Press contact:
Lana Salah Barkawi, Executive & Artistic Director
lana@mizna.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 18, 2021

While we are heartbroken and distraught by the brutality that is being experienced by Palestinians today, Mizna has some happy news to share: we are one of ten Minnesota organizations to receive the Regional Cultural Treasure Award. This award is part of a $12.6 million regional initiative of America’s Cultural Treasures which will provide new funding for Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American-led arts organizations. The funding is made possible by a collaboration of the McKnight, Ford, Bush and Jerome Foundations.

To honor the significant impact Mizna has made on the local and national cultural landscapes over decades, the organization will receive an unrestricted grant of $500,000, to be distributed over the next five years. 

For more than twenty years, Mizna has been creating a decolonized cultural space to reflect the expansiveness of our community and to foster exchange, examine ideas, and engage audiences in meaningful art. Mizna publishes the only Southwest Asian and North African literary and art journal in the country; produces the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival; and offers classes, readings, performances, public art and community events, which have featured more than 400 local and global writers, filmmakers and artists.These generous unrestricted funds will help us continue this critical work sustainably for another twenty years.

“This award is staggering. The recognition of and investment in our work is incredible and far from typical for us,” said Lana Salah Barkawi, Mizna’s Executive and Artistic Director. “We are so often doing more with less—working to be the cultural space that our incredible artistic community deserves. This award affirms our work and our values.”

Mizna has been named as a recipient alongside nine other Minnesota organizations, American Indian Community Housing Organization Arts Program, Ananya Dance Theatre, Indigenous Roots, Juxtaposition Arts, Pangea World Theater, Somali Museum, Theater Mu, TruArtSpeaks, and Walker|West. Many of these organizations have been partners in our endeavor to create decolonized and diverse cultural spaces with and for our communities.

“We hold both joy and grief today,” Barkawi said. “While we celebrate and feel honored by this award, our hearts and minds are with our Palestinian family in Gaza, Jerusalem, the West Bank, and everywhere in occupied Palestine. We have made the Palestine Issue of our literary journal available for free as a small gesture of solidarity.”

Learn more about the Regional Cultural Treasure Awards here.

So far this year, Mizna has launched the Mizna Film Series, a monthly series featuring expanded film programming exploring revolutionary forms of cinema from SWANA and beyond; we published the special Comix Issue of our lit journal; we premiered Out of the Depths: Winter Stories, a digital winter-themed performance evening featuring local SWANA artists with First Avenue as part of the Great Northern Festival; and hosted a reading featuring sixteen authors published in our Queer + Trans Voices issue of Mizna.

In 2020, Mizna published the Queer + Trans Voices issue of our lit journal, co-presented three public discussions about Black Lives Matter and the SWANA community, toured a visual art exhibition and film series to rural Minnesota, presented the Arab Film Fest Collab virtually with three other leading Arab orgs, and much more.

Keep up with Mizna’s programming here.

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FOR IMMEDIATED RELEASE:
FOUR MAJOR NATIONAL ARAB AMERICAN CULTURAL ORGS JOIN FORCES TO PRESENT A VIRTUAL ARAB FILM FESTIVAL

The Arab Film Fest Collab will highlight Afro-Arab + Black SWANA voices, screen Najwa Najjar’s Between Heaven and Earth and more

Press contact:
Ahmed AbdulMageed
ahmed@mizna.org

Stay up to date with more news: arabfilmfestcollab.org 

Minneapolis-St.Paul, MN (Oct. 27, 2020) – Four film and cultural organizations from across the country come together for an exciting week of virtual programming, the inaugural Arab Film Fest Collab (AFFC). The Film Fest will include North American and US premieres of highly anticipated films by Arab and Southwest Asian + North African (SWANA) artists, including Najwa Najjar’s award-winning drama Between Heaven and Earth (2019) and Revolution from Afar (Bentley Brown, 2020), a documentary spotlighting Sudanese musicians and poets. Other featured films include In Vitro (2019) by Palestinian artist and filmmaker Larissa Sansour.

The Arab American National Museum (AANM), Arab Film and Media Institute (AFMI), ArteEast and Mizna collectively present the Arab Film Fest Collab December 3–13, 2020. With programs highlighting Afro-Arab and Black SWANA voices and narratives, AFFC aims to capture the diverse narratives and complexity of the Arab world. Genres include drama, science-fiction, comedy, and documentary, in both short-form and feature lengths. Languages represented in the films include Arabic, French, Somali, and English, and every non-English offering is subtitled in English.

“The pandemic has brought so many challenges, but it has also jump-started a collaboration that is a long time coming, bringing together the resources and creative input of four leading Arab/SWANA arts organizations. In the spirit of experimentation and being open to new possibilities, we’re excited to bring extraordinary debut films right into the homes of film lovers across the country,” said Lana S. Barkawi, Executive + Artistic Director of Mizna.

AFFC also offers special programming, including talkbacks with renowned filmmakers and scholars, as well as screenings and panel discussions with emerging Arab filmmakers. On December 11, AFFC will partner with the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University (NYU) to present Excavating Alternative Histories, a panel featuring filmmakers Naeem Mohaiemen, Adam Khalil, and Zack Khalil in conversation with the director of the Center for Media, Culture and History at NYU, Faye Ginsburg. This program will be presented in tandem with AFFC screenings of films by the Khalil brothers, program TBA. 

To learn more about the Film Fest, sponsorship opportunities, and to sign up for updates, visit arabfilmfestcollab.org

Stills to In Vitro (Larissa Sansour, 2019), Between Heaven and Earth (Najwa Najjar, 2019), and Revolution from Afar (Bentley Brown, 2020) are available here.

About AANM
The Arab American National Museum (AANM) is the first and only museum of its kind. Dedicated to telling the Arab American story, AANM documents, preserves and presents Arab American history, culture and contributions.www.arabamericanmuseum.org

About AFMI
The Arab Film and Media Institute (AFMI) is the first organization of its kind outside the Arab world, a unique ecosystem to find, nurture, connect, and develop Arab film and media projects. AFMI aims to empower local Arab talent to tell their communities’ stories in their own voices through workshops, development and opportunities to screen their work. Through film, education, mentorship, and new media, AFMI’s mission is to change pervasive worldwide anti-Arab narratives. AFMI is the producer of the Arab Film Festival, the country’s oldest and largest festival of Arab films.www.arabfilminstitute.org

About ArteEast
ArteEast is a leading NY-based nonprofit dedicated to promoting contemporary arts of the Middle East and North Africa. Through public programming, strategic partnerships, and online platforms, ArteEast is a forum for critical dialogue and exchange.www.arteeast.org

About Mizna
Mizna is a critical platform for contemporary literature, art, film, and cultural programming centering the work of Arab and Southwest Asian and North African artists. For more than twenty years, Mizna has sought to reflect the depth and multiplicity of our community and have been committed to being a space for Arab, Muslim, and other artists from the region to reclaim our narratives and engage audiences in meaningful and artistically excellent art.www.mizna.org

Thank you to our generous sponsors who are making this major film event possible!
Supporters: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, California Arts Council, Center for Arab American Philanthropy, Grants for the Arts, McKnight Foundation, Metro Regional Arts Council, Minnesota State Arts Board, National Endowment for the Arts, National Network for Arab American Communities, New York Community Trust, Saint Paul STAR Program, San Francisco Arts Commission
Sponsors: Wisdom Ways

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Mizna read the below accountability statement to commence the webinar series addressing anti-Black racism in SWANA + Diaspora communities. See our statement on the murder of George Floyd here, and watch the recorded webinars here.

Hello, I’m Lana Barkawi, the Executive and Artistic Director at Mizna, a nonprofit arts organization with a mission to provide a critical platform for Arab and Southwest Asian and North African film, literature, and art. Together with our partners the Imagining  Transnational Solidarities Research Circle and the Arab Resource and Organizing Center and a number of co-sponsoring orgs., I am happy to welcome you to the first in this webinar series called Black Lives Matter: Anti-Black Racism in SWANA and Diaspora. This English-language discussion will be followed by ones in Farsi and in Arabic in the coming weeks. I’ll be giving some context and letting you know how we are committing to being accountable to racial justice before passing things over to the moderators who will introduce our incredible panelists.

You may be wondering about the term SWANA, which stands for Southwest Asia and North Africa. This is a decolonized term that describes the region without centering Europe the way that a term like “Middle East” does, and rather describes the region from a geographic basis. It was suggested by SWANA feminist and queer scholars in the 90s and we have put it into practice.

This webinar series grew out of the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, in the metropolitan area that Mizna, ITSRC, and some of our cosponsoring organizations call home. It grew out of our grief and anger at the ongoing, anti-Black racism that permeates every aspect of life and is killing Black people. This is a galvanizing moment when we are witnessing an unprecedented global, multiracial challenge to racism as a historical system.

In heeding the call of this transformative moment, of the hopefulness and challenge of this important time, Mizna and ITSRC as the lead organizers, are committing to be accountable to the Black Lives Matter movement for racial justice. We recognize that anti-Black racism is not only a pandemic of the West, but it is embedded in the history and present of our own SWANA communities. For far too long, our majority non-Black SWANA communities have benefitted from the privilege of being light-skinned in systems built on white supremacy and anti-Black racism. Both in our home countries and in Diaspora, there are countless ways that we have been complicit in the injustices faced by Black people. In every country in the SWANA region, there are Black people. They are Black Arabs, Black Iranians, Black Turks, Black Kurds, Black Assyrians, Black Armenians, Black Jews, Black Alevis, Black Amazigh, Black bedouins, as well as Black people in many other ethnic groups in the SWANA region and its Diaspora. Many have lived in the SWANA region for centuries and are integral to the history, culture, politics, and economy of the region. And while their lived experiences and their experiences of racism may vary regionally or be different from the U.S. Black experience, they also face stigmatization, discrimination, and erasure because of the historical prevelance of white supremacy around the world. Even as the Black Lives Matter movement has sparked an awakening to anti-Black racism in the US among non-Black SWANA people, Black SWANA people remain invisible to the SWANA consciousness. The inequalities and racist attitudes towards Black SWANA people are rarely discussed in the political realm and in cultural productions associated with the SWANA region and its Diaspora, even as Black SWANA people have had no choice but to have these discussions because of their lived experience. 

We have to stop the practices that perpetuate a harmful divide between non-Black and Black SWANA people in our communities and organizations, without erasing the discrimination that Black people often face in our region, or erasing Blackness in our communities. We recognize that the struggles of all SWANA people are absolutely intertwined with the struggles of Black SWANA people. Our solidarity with the struggle to free Palestine, with the fight to lift the sanctions on Iran, with the activism against U.S. militarism and Israeli settler colonialism, with the struggles against dictatorships and security states, with the fight against cis-hetero patriarchy, with the fight against xenophobic immigration policies, with the confrontations to ablist practices and laws, and with the contestations to neoliberal policies in the U.S. and in the SWANA region, are all connected to, and contingent on Black liberation. None of us will be free until Black liberation is achieved.

We are committing to take the work of Black Lives Matter beyond this web series. We acknowledge that Blackness should not only enter our conversations when acts of violence are perpetuated against Black people, or in moments of crisis. That our commitment to anti-Black violence and racism should have been reflected in our organizational makeup prior to this particular historical moment. Building on our organizations’ past work for racial justice and acknowledging that we need to do a lot better, we pledge that our commitment to racial justice will continue and deepen by meaningfully engaging with Blackness in our communities. 

Mizna and ITSRC are made up of non-Black SWANA people in decision-making roles. We recognize that this is a problem that is rooted in anti-Black racism, and we commit to changing that. We commit to proactively and meaningfully making our organizations and research groups inclusive of the Black members of our communities in leadership roles by ensuring that our organizational boards, our paid staff,  or our research collaborations include Black people. We commit that in all of our programs and activities, racial justice and fighting anti-Black racism will be central to our continuing values and practices. Mizna and ITSRC are not large or well-resourced organizations or research projects. We have a history of doing work from a social justice–based value system, however, we recognize that whatever our particular situation and resource limitations, there is no valid reason that excuses the current lack of representation of Black SWANA people among our board, staff, or research groups. In our joint struggle, we know that coalition building and solidarity are active commitments, and that we must educate ourselves and the communities that we serve to acknowledge and fight the active presence of anti-Blackness in our multiple homes—in SWANA and Diaspora. We know that we will on occasion make mistakes, and we will work to learn from them. This an active commitment made from a place of love, hope, and joy, knowing that a racially just world is achievable if each of us accepts our role and agency in the joint struggle to dismantle racism in its many articulations. I welcome you to follow our organizations’ work going forward, and to hold us accountable to this commitment.

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Exciting news: Mizna was named Best Non-profit of the Twin Cities by Citypages! For over 20 years, Mizna has provided a critical space for SWANA + Arab American artistic expression and we will continue to do so.

Thanks for recognizing our work!
Check out the rest of the winners in the article here!

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Mizna celebrated twenty years with a benefit on November 2, 2019 at Hennepin Theatre Trust. NPR reporter and Mizna journal contributor Hannah Allam covered the event for Weekend Edition. See all photos from our twentieth anniversary benefit here.

Hannah Allam is a Washington-based national security correspondent for NPR, focusing on homegrown extremism. Before joining NPR, she was a national correspondent at BuzzFeed News, covering U.S. Muslims and other issues of race, religion and culture. Allam previously reported for McClatchy, spending a decade overseas as bureau chief in Baghdad during the Iraq war and in Cairo during the Arab Spring rebellions. She moved to Washington in 2012 to cover foreign policy, then in 2015 began a yearlong series documenting rising hostility toward Islam in America. Her coverage of Islam in the United States won three national religion reporting awards in 2018 and 2019. Allam was part of McClatchy teams that won an Overseas Press Club award for exposing death squads in Iraq and a Polk Award for reporting on the Syrian conflict. She was a 2009 Nieman fellow at Harvard and currently serves on the board of the International Women’s Media Foundation.

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