Fatimah Asghar, Rasheed Newson & Moriel Rothman-Zecher: A Conversation

Fatimah Asghar, the author of If They Come for Us, is a poet, filmmaker, educator, and performer. They are the writer and co-creator of Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series highlighting friendships between women of color. Along with Safia Elhillo, they are the editor of Halal If You Hear Me, an anthology that celebrates Muslim writers who are also women, queer, gender-nonconforming, and/or trans. In When We Were Sisters: A Novel (One World), Asghar traces the intense bond of three orphaned siblings who, after their parents die, are left to raise one another. The youngest, Kausar, grapples with the incomprehensible loss of their parents as she also charts out her understanding of gender; Aisha, the middle sister, spars with her “crybaby” younger sibling as she desperately tries to hold on to her sense of family in an impossible situation; and Noreen, the eldest, does her best in the role of sister-mother while also trying to create a life for herself, on her own terms. When We Were Sisters examines the bonds and fractures of sisterhood, the perils facing Muslim American girls alone against the world, and show how those who’ve lost everything might still make homes in one another.

Moriel Rothman-Zecher is a Jerusalem-born novelist and poet. His debut novel, Sadness Is a White Bird, was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the National Jewish Book Award. His poetry and essays have been published in Barrelhouse, Colorado Review, The Common, The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, and ZYZZYVA, and he is the recipient of two MacDowell Fellowships. In Before All the World: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Leyb and Charles meet in a Philadelphia speakeasy at the end of Prohibition. The bar, says Charles in secondhand Yiddis, welcomes feygeles. Leyb is startled; here is suave Charles, fingers stained with ink, an easy manner with the barkeep, a Black man from the Seventh Ward, a fellow traveler of Red Emma’s, speaking Yiddish to a young man he will come to call Lion. Leyb is haunted by memories of Zatelsk, where everyone except him, 10 non-Jews, and a young poet named Gittl was taken to the forest and killed. And then miraculously, Gittl is in Philadelphia, too, surrounded by the spirits of her siblings and with a shadowy patron. Flowing and churning and seething with a glorious surge of language, carried along by questions of survival and hope and the possibility of a better world, Before All the World lays bare the impossibility of escaping trauma, the necessity of believing in a better way ahead, and the power that comes from our responsibility to the future.

Rasheed Newson is a writer and producer of Bel-Air, The Chi, and Narcos. He currently resides in Pasadena, California, with his husband and two children. In his debut, My Government Means to Kill Me: A Novel (Flatiron Books), Newson follows Earl “Trey” Singleton III, who, born into a wealthy Black Indianapolis family, leaves his overbearing parents and their expectations behind by running away to New York City with only a few dollars in his pocket. It’s there that Trey meets up with a cast of characters that changes his life forever. He volunteers at a renegade home hospice for AIDS patients, and after being put to the test by gay rights activists, becomes a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Along the way he attempts to navigate past traumas and searches for ways to maintain familial relationships – all while seeking the meaning of life amid so much death. My Government Means to Kill Me is a queer coming-of-age story following the personal and political awakening of a young gay Black man in 1980s New York City, coming to terms with his role in the midst of a seismic social reckoning.