Link to the students’ legal defence fund.
Third annual Watermelon Seeds Festival of Literature. Internationally acclaimed and award-winning writers read in solidarity with the Palestinian people in a time of genocide. The Festival features Batool Abu Akleen (48Kg.), Sarah Aziza (The Hollow Half), Jess Housty (Crushed Wild Mint), Sara Kishawi, Hajer Mirwali (Revolutions), Magnolia Pauker (InterViews in Performance Philosophy), Zeina Sleiman (Where the Jasmine Blooms), and Smokii Sumac (Born Sacred). A hybrid event with readings by video and an interview on site.
WHERE: Gustafson Theatre (B355, R203), Vancouver Island University, 900 Fifth St, Nanaimo, BC, V9R 5S5, on the land of the Snuneymuxw First Nation | and by live video stream; click here to register for the livestream
WHEN: Saturday, 23 May 2026, at 12:00 PM Pacific time
ADMISSION: Free and open to the public
Following the success of the second Watermelon Seeds Festivals of Literature, the third annual Festival will take place in the Gustafson Theatre at Vancouver Island University on 23 May 2026. The inaugural grassroots Festival took place in May 2024, and it featured authors reading in support of student protesters in the Palestine Solidarity Encampment in the exercise of their rights to free expression and peaceful assembly. The mandate of the third Festival is to commemorate the second anniversary of the Encampment and to witness the ongoing genocide in Gaza; it also seeks to foster connections between literatures from Palestine and Turtle Island, and to promote intercultural understanding. It is partly inspired by the Palestine Festival of Literature, in which international authors combine with their Palestinian counterparts for an act of cultural solidarity. The Watermelon Seeds Festival of Literature is sponsored by VIU’s Department of Creative Writing and Journalism, VIU’s Muslim Women’s Club, VIU’s Palestine Solidarity Encampment, Nanaimo’s Students for Palestine Committee, VIU’s Faculty and Employees for Students for Palestine Committee, VIUFA’s Human Rights and International Solidarity Committee, VIUFA’s Women and Gender Equity Committee, and Windowseat Books.
The Festival’s participants are:
Batool Abu Akleen (48Kg. / ٤٨ كغم, Tenement Press, 2025) is a Palestinian poet and translator from Gaza City, now studying at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris. At the age of fifteen, 2020, she won the Barjeel Poetry Prize for her poem “I didn’t steal the cloud,” which was published in the Beirut-based magazine Rusted Radishes thereafter. Abu Akleen’s poetry has been translated into several languages and featured in numerous international publications, including ArabLit and The Massachusetts Review, amongst others. Her poem “Gunpowder” was awarded third place in the 2025 London Magazine poetry prize, and her work was included in the July 2024 issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, “Salam to Gaza.”Abu Akleen was Modern Poetry in Translation’s 2024 “Poet / Translator in Residence.” Her poetry has appeared in editors Mohammed Al-Zaqzooq and Mahmoud Alshaer’s anthology, Letters from Gaza (Penguin, 2025) and — alongside Nahil Mohan, Sondos Sabra, and Ala’a Obaid — she is one of the four Gazan authors included in Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide (Biblioasis / Comma Press, 2025). Alongside Rim Aoude, Liam Honran, Zaffar Kunial, Peter Oswald, and Alice Oswald, Abu Akleen was a mentor for the “Hand’s Up” Project (SOAS, University of London), resulting in the publication, From Dust We Rise: New Poetry from Palestine (2025). Her début poetry collection, 48Kg. (Tenement Press, 2025), will be republished by Penguin in 2026.
Sarah Aziza (The Hollow Half, Catapult, 2025) is a Palestinian American writer, translator, and artist with roots in ‘Ibdis and Deir al-Balah, Gaza. The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship and numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, she has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, South Africa, the West Bank, and the United States. Her award-winning journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, Lux, The Washington Post, The Intercept, The Rumpus, NPR, The Margins, and The Nation, among other publications.
Jess Housty (Crushed Wild Mint, Nightwood Editions, 2023) is a parent, writer, and land-based educator from the Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) Nation in Bella Bella. They live and work in their unceded ancestral homelands where they focus their practice on community building, food sovereignty, and Indigenous culture and language resurgence. Housty is the author of début poetry collection Crushed Wild Mint and a forthcoming poetry collection called How to Nourish a Cannibal (Nightwood Editions, 2026). In addition, their work can be found in Room Magazine, The Tyee, Hakai Magazine, and various collections and anthologies.
Sara Kishawi is a Palestinian community organizer and Sociology graduate from Vancouver Island University. Originally from Gaza, she has been a leading voice in campus and community organizing, and served as the spokesperson for the VIU Palestine Solidarity Encampment. Through rallies, protests, and public talks, she works to raise awareness about the genocide in Gaza and encourages others to take meaningful action in support of Palestinian human rights.
Hajer Mirwali (Revolutions, Talonbooks, 2025) is a Palestinian and Iraqi writer living in Toronto. Her first book, Revolutions, is a collection of poetry on shame, pleasure, and Arab Muslim girlhood. Two poems from the collection also appear in an anthology of Palestinian poetry called Heaven Looks Like Us (Haymarket Books, 2025). Mirwali’s work has been published in The Ex-Puritan, Brick Magazine, Room Magazine, and Joyland.
Magnolia Pauker (InterViews in Performance Philosophy: Crossings and Conversations, Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) is an undisciplined scholar, Professor of Studies in Women and Gender at Vancouver Island University, and co-founder of Transnational Feminist Partnerships for Collective Liberation with Sudanese advocate for peace and justice, Amel Aldehaib, an activist project rooted in solidarity as the political practice of decolonial love and collective liberation.
Zeina Sleiman (Where the Jasmine Blooms, Roseway Publishing, 2025) is a Palestinian writer and academic based out of amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton). Her début Where the Jasmine Blooms is an Evergreen Award Finalist and her story “My Father’s Soil” was a finalist for the CBC Short Story Prize in 2025. She has a PhD in Political Science and is also the author of Sanctuary Regions and the Struggle for Belonging (Palgrave, 2020).
Smokii Sumac (Born Sacred: Poems for Palestine, Roseway Publishing, 2025) is a Ktunaxa two-spirit poet and emerging playwright. Their first book, you are enough: love poems for the end of the world (Kegedonce Press, 2018), won an Indigenous Voices Award. Indigenous sovereignty and centring our own knowledges is deeply important to Sumac’s creative work. He believes in the power of storytelling and has featured Indigenous writers and musicians on The ʔasqanaki Podcast, a limited podcast series that Sumac created and hosts. Their first play, Seven and One Heart, was workshopped in Montreal and developed in Toronto during the 2024 Weesageechak Begins to Dance festival. Sumac will be also releasing a Canada Council-funded spoken word album. Sumac is happy to live in his home territories of ʔamakʔis Ktunaxa, near the banks of the Kootenay River, with his husband, their cats, chicken, and a “big ole rez dog” named Kootenay Lou.
For more information about the Watermelon Seeds Festival:
watermelon.seeds.litfest[at]protonmail.com