The following speech was given at the Dayton Literary Peace Prize ceremony on November 10, 2025.
*
I want to thank my editor, Jordan Pavlin, il miglior fabro, for believing in me and this book from the second it landed in your inbox. Thank you to my steadfast agent, Jacqueline Ko, especially for your years of joyfully and passionately representing me when I was but a lowly poet. To the other writers recognized tonight, to the judges, the organizers: it has been a dream. Your company is the prize. Tommy, Angel and Shira, Dan, Karen, the group chat: thank you. The book and I are better made for having been loved by you. To my spouse Paige Lewis, the past decade sprinting to keep up with your mind has made my own indelibly quicker, wiser, and more humane. Thank you, I love you.
Thirteen years ago I was still in active addiction, pissing the bed nightly, lurching from crisis to crisis, passing out every night hoping to not wake up. It is absurd to be standing here tonight—literally, absurd, it strains credulity.
It is absurd to be here, too, in this beautiful warm space as a third winter falls across a besieged Gaza. Such is the ineffable at-once-ness of these moments. It is absurd that people who look and pray like me and my cousins and uncles, with hearts that could fit in my chest, will die today from bombs forged and dropped by my tax dollars. Absurd that, weeks after announcing a purported ceasefire, just today as of my writing this at 2:56 PM EST November 9th 2025, Israel has already bombed the Bureij refugee camp, killing three people, and has carried out a sequence of drone strikes in Lebanon, with casualties yet unreported.
Israel is, as of today, November 9th 2025, still only allowing a third of the agreed upon humanitarian aid into Gaza. From the vantage point of a Palestinian parent’s mortal terror, my moral outrage, my insulted sense of human dignity, looks profoundly comfortable. It is incumbent upon me—and yes, I do think us—to leverage the delta between our outrage and their terror into action.
It is absurd that people who look and pray like me and my cousins and uncles, with hearts that could fit in my chest, will die today from bombs forged and dropped by my tax dollars.
I spoke about this yesterday in the panel, but it central to my belief in fiction’s role towards revolutionary action: Empire uses the abstraction of data amidst a firehose of meaningless language to cudgel us into idleness and cynicism. Literature opposes this, asks us to slow down our metabolization of language, become aware of its bond and density.
My novel Martyr! attempts to show how a single life erased from time—1 of 290 civilians killed by the US Navy on July 3, 1988 on board Iran Air Flight 655—ripples through the lives of its characters for decades. Every conversation Cyrus has, every person he sleeps with, every drug he does and doesn’t do, stems from a single woman being shot out of the sky in 1988.
I have two nieces: the older, Nora, does math worksheets for fun. She already reads faster than me, and possibly with greater comprehension. The younger, Layla, writes and mails lengthy letters to my dog—not to me or my spouse, but to my forty-five pound blue heeler Galilee. She fixes stamps on envelopes, drops them in a blue postbox by her school. The way I love my nieces, the way I recognize them as utterly unprecedented and irreplaceable, is how every Palestinian feels about the kids in their lives. It is excruciating to have to say: people who look and pray like me love love our children exactly the same way you love yours. There is no such thing as a bad child. There is no serious ethical or political system that can justify the murder and starvation of children.
The official civilian death toll in Gaza now tops 69,000. When I say 69,000 civilians killed in Gaza, I am somatically aware I’ve uttered a pulverizing reality, but it lacks definition—my brain stem just recognizes it as a large number, bigger than five, fewer than a billion million. I cannot distinguish, somatically, between 69,000 and 68 or 70. This is not, I don’t think, a moral failure, but it is a moral crisis.
It is excruciating to have to say: people who look and pray like me love our children exactly the same way you love yours.
I believe writers, in concert with organizers and teachers and plumbers and grant writers and legal advocates and everyone else, have a role to play in liberation work. By restoring specific narrative to abstract casualty data, we restore for readers the urgent somatic obliteration of individual loss. Toni Cade Bambara says the job of the artist is to make revolution irresistible. If you recognize the interiority of the harmed as being as vivid and complex as your own, it becomes impossible to sit idly by amidst a livestreamed genocide. It is not complicated to say “I am on the side of whoever is not actively starving children” unless the contingency of those children’s humanity is an unanswered question in your mind.
I’m grateful for language today. The future I want to live in has books, and writers celebrating those books. But far more urgently, the future I want to live in is one where hospitals aren’t rubbled in the night, where refugee camps aren’t bombed weeks into a purported ceasefire, where orphaned children do not have to record videos of themselves weeping over their murdered parents to persuade the world of their humanity.
The Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail says “writing is not medicine, it’s an x-ray.” That is to say, the work we writers do points to action, but it does not supplant it. I will be donating the entirety of this prize money to Doctors Without Borders, and I invite everyone present with the means to contribute as well. It takes thirty seconds, you can do it on your phones right now at doctorswithoutborders.org. Thank you again to the judges and to everyone who read Martyr!. The gift of your time and attention is towering; I will work the rest of my life to make myself worthy of your regard.
Leave a Reply