Ta-Nehisi Coates
#1 New York Times bestselling author of Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer
Mosab Abu Toha
Award-winning Palestinian poet
“Every hole in the
earth is my wound.”
earth is my wound.”
Photo Credit: Mohamed Mahdy
Mosab Abu Toha is an acclaimed Palestinian poet, journalist, and writer whose poetry unflinchingly documents the heartbreaking reality of life in Gaza under Occupation. His 2024 collection of poems written during the siege of Gaza, Forest of Noise, is an astonishing work of pain and beauty wrested from wartime. In his urgent and moving talks on the place of art during genocide, he shares his poetry and experiences witnessing and documenting the war in Palestine.
-
About Mosab Abu Toha
Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist Mosab Abu Toha’s entire life has been lived under the occupation of Gaza. Born in a refugee camp and still marked by shrapnel from an air strike he survived in 2009, Abu Toha was barely thirty years old and already famous for his poetry when the current siege of Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed and destroyed his house (as well as the English-language community library he had painstakingly built), he and his family fled for safety. During their harrowing escape, Abu Toha was detained by Israeli forces and released only after an international outcry. Amid the chaos, Abu Toha continued to write his poems—as a way of documenting wartime, but also of remembering his home in relative peacetime. His 2024 collection, Forest of Noise, is a collection of these poems.
Praised as “a powerful, capacious, and profound book, rich in intelligence and lyric dexterity that fuses poetry’s two great promises, wonder and testament, into crystalline focus” by Ocean Vuong, Forest of Noise was published to great critical acclaim and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2024 and a New Yorker Best Book & Essential Read of 2024, further establishing Abu Toha as a major voice in poetry and for the Palestinian people. In his moving and powerful events, Abu Toha shares stories and poems that invite a wider audience to learn about the injustices faced by his community and the resilience of life under occupation.
Mosab Abu Toha’s first poetry collection, 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 one day rebuild. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award for his “Letter from Gaza” columns for The New Yorker.
Contact us for more information about bringing Mosab Abu Toha to your organization.
-
Speaking Topics
Forest of Noise: Poetry Under Occupation
What is the role of poetry during a genocide? For Mosab Abu Toha, “Writing a poem is an act of resistance against forgetting—not only forgetting the story or the experience, but also the feelings that come with that experience.” Weaving together his poems, video and photographic images, and his personal witness of the siege of Gaza and life under occupation, Mosab Abu Toha’s powerful talks and onstage conversations bear witness to the suffering of war while remembering the beauty of his home, asking audiences to recognize the humanity of Palestinians and to reckon with some of the most profound questions of our time.
Categories: Poetry Speakers, New Speakers -
Video
-
Praise for Mosab Abu Toha
Praise for Forest of Noise
Mosab Abu Toha carries a vast library in his heart. His books hold the names of people and places covered in drones and rubble. His books hold letters, odes, reports, and elegies; generations of gardens and graves. Abu Toha opens his library to us in Forest of Noise. His poems resonate with undeniable immediacy upon a first reading and continue ringing more and more urgently with every subsequent reading. Abu Toha writes with a brilliance that makes anyone who encounters these astonishing poems both witness and kin.
— Terrance Hayes, author of So to SpeakMore than any news reporting, this heartbreaking collection makes vividly real the suffering in Gaza and what it’s like to face huge, ongoing loss….Abu Toha can be plainspoken, then turn around with a stark, horrific image that drops like hot coals…. One mourns with Abu Tohu as he asks his dead brother, ‘Will my bones find you when I die?’ Highly recommended.
— Library Journal, starred review*Abu Toha takes up the mantle of both poet and historian, chronicling the violence he has inherited, witnessed, and survived…. his poetry is both a blueprint and a legacy…unwavering.
— Destiny O. Birdsong, Poets & Writers MagazineHeartbreaking, evocative, transformative poetry of witness to the horror of warfare. It happens in real time, as we turn pages. This is powerful, impactful poetry, a book you won’t soon forget. Forgetting is not an option. Buy two copies. One for yourself. Another for any soldier you might meet in the street.
— llya Kaminsky, author of Deaf RepublicA powerful, capacious, and profound book, rich in intelligence and lyric dexterity that fuses poetry’s two great promises, wonder and testament, into crystalline focus.
— Ocean Vuong, author of Time Is a Mother and On Earth We’re Briefly GorgeousThe poems in Mosab Abu Toha’s Forest of Noise are urgent, prayerful howls in the bleakest of nights. Necessary, and wrought out of both terror and truth, these poems sing and weep in a rough and haunting harmony. Abu Toha’s work begs the reader to pay close attention as each poetic line is, at its heart, a lifeline to survival.
— Ada Limón, US Poet Laureate, author of The Hurting KindPraise for Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza
Toha's meticulous, and often brief, lines thread his own breathing witness into a poetry of mighty resolve, insisting poetry itself be worthy of a Palestinian lament....So haunting, so searing, and above all, so lit by Mosab Abu Toha's vibrant–what else to call it?–love.
— Canisia Lubrin, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry JudgeLike poets he admires, Abu Toha attempts to find beauty around him, however fleeting, and he also takes the reader on philosophical explorations of his reality. The poems don't just explore the physical experience of the conflict but also what isn't there because of generations of conflict. Not only does he contemplate the lives lost in Gaza but also the lost experiences: not being able to grow up in family homes, not having a grave of a loved one to visit, or, for Abu Toha specifically, not being able to go on adventures in the city of Jaffa that was lost to his grandparents who fled their home to Gaza.
— World Literature TodayWritten from his native Gaza, Abu Toha's accomplished debut contrasts scenes of political violence with natural beauty: In one poem, a 'nightingale departs the wet earth' two stanzas before the 'sound of a drone / intrudes.'
— The New York Times -
Books by Mosab Abu Toha
-
Media About Mosab Abu Toha
Request Fees
and Availability
- 212 572-2013
- Mosab Abu Toha travels from Syracuse, NY
Featured Title
Forest of Noise
“If literature has any power to change the world or resist injustice, I think it must lie in the astounding poems of Mosab Abu Toha.”—Noreen Masud, The Guardian
Similar Speakers
Omar El Akkad
Award-winning journalist and author of the debut novel American War
Ocean Vuong
Poet and author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous