Please join us for the publication of the UK edition of Lena Khalaf Taffaha’s Something About Living.
Something About Living was awarded the National Book Award in 2024 and we’re pleased to present it’s UK publication with the 87 Press at the LRB Bookshop.
Lena will be in conversation with So Mayer, whose latest book, Bad Language, was just published by Peninsula Press.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is one of the most influential Palestinian poets working in English today. Her collections have won multiple prizes and her poems have been published across the spectrum of poetry magazines.
She was the translator and curator of the 2022 series “Poems from Palestine” at the Baffler magazine. In 2024 she curated a year-long subscription of Palestinian poetry books with Open Books, Seattle’s poetry-only bookstore.
She was a co-founder of the highly impactful, Institute for Middle East Understanding, as well as serving as the spokesperson for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
She has also lived in and traveled across the Arab world, and many of her poems are inspired by the experience of crossing cultural, geographic and political borders, borders between languages, between the present and the living past.
She lives with her family in Redmond, Washington.
So Mayer is a writer, editor, bookseller, organiser and film curator. Their most recent book is Bad Language (Peninsula Press, 2025), a memoir and manifesto on language and power. Their speculative collection Truth and Dare (Cipher Press, 2023) was longlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize and Edge Hill Short Story Prize, and their book-length essay A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing (Peninsula Press, 2022) inspired the BBC Sounds podcast The Film We Can’t See. They co-edited The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin and the Locus Award-winning collection Space Crone by Ursula K. Le Guin with Sarah Shin for Silver Press, and Unreal Sex with Adam Zmith for Cipher Press. So works with Burley Fisher Books, queer feminist film curation collective Club Des Femmes, and Outburst Arts in Belfast, as editor of catflap magazine.
Please note: LRB Bookshop events start promptly at 7 p.m., so please arrive in good time.