Skip to Content

The Center for Fiction Presents Jamila Ahmed on Every Rising Sun with Zeyn Joukhadar

This product is currently out of stock and unavailable.

Tuesday, 7:00 pm EDT July 18, 2023

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

The Ticket/Voucher option includes a $10 Bookstore voucher, redeemable toward the featured event book on the night of the event. All registrants will receive a link to livestream the event.


Join Pakistani American writer Jamila Ahmed for the launch of her debut novel Every Rising Sun. Set in twelfth-century Persia, this retelling of One Thousand and One Nights re-centers Sheherezade in a feminist light, exploring her efforts to maneuver court intrigue to save her homeland–with her very own head at stake. Author Zeyn Joukhadar (The Map of Salt and Stars, The Thirty Names of Night) will join Ahmed to discuss this love letter to medieval Islamic history. The audience will have a chance to ask questions about the extensive research and writing process behind the novel, the narrative’s complex characters and themes, and the process of retelling such a culturally significant classic in a new way.

Every-Rising-Sun-cover-image-Vrinda-Madan-scaled

In Conversation

  • Jamila Ahmed (no credit line) - Vrinda Madan

    Jamila Ahmed

    Jamila Ahmed

    The daughter of Pakistani immigrants, Jamila Ahmed is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Barnard College, where she studied medieval Islamic history. Her writing has been published in the Normal School, Slate, Pittsburgh-Post Gazette, the Briar Cliff Review, and Colorlines.

  • zeyn_2023 - Vrinda Madan

    Zeyn Joukhadar

    Zeyn Joukhadar

    Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the Lambda Literary Award- and Stonewall Book Award-winning novel The Thirty Names of Night as well as The Map of Salt and Stars, which won the Middle East Book Award and was a Goodreads Choice Awards and Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize finalist. His work has appeared in Electric Literature, Salon, the Paris Review, [PANK], and elsewhere and has been included in anthologies such as Letters to a Writer of Color, This Arab Is Queer, Kink, and others. He has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Joukhadar serves on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), and mentors emerging writers of color with the Periplus Collective.