I Can Imagine It for Us: A Palestinian Daughter’s Memoir

Mai Serhan

Writer, Editor and Translator

Mai Serhan is a writer, editor and translator. She holds a BA in English & Comparative Literature and MA in Arabic Studies from the American University in Cairo, and an MSt in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford. She’s the author of the award-winning poetry chapbook, CAIRO: the undelivered letters and the upcoming memoir, The Renegades: a story of Palestinian diaspora. She’s also the translator of, This is What Has Come to Be, a collection of Sayyed Darwish’s song lyrics, published by the American University in Cairo (2018). Her writing has appeared in Anomaly, Oyster River Pages, Flash Fiction Magazine, Defunkt, Swamp, The Writers & Readers, Refuge, Oxford Magazine, Rusted Radishes, Narratively, The Vanity Papers, Jadaliyya and Arablit Quarterly. It has also received support from Winter Tangerine, Poet’s House, Poets & Writers, The Palestine Museum US, Millay Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. Her short story, Tamima, won her the Madalyn Lamont Literary Award from the American University in Cairo (2017) and the Emerging Writer Award from Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, California (2019); The poem, Truce, was a winner of the Lunch Ticket Twitter Poetry Contest (2021); The flash memoir, The Place Where I’m From, was long-listed for the Memoir Prize 2019 Award by Fish Publishing in the UK; The short story, Blind Spot, was shortlisted for the Oxford-BNU Award in Creative Writing (2021); The poetry chapbook, Cairo: the undelivered letters, won her the Center for Book Arts Poetry Chapbook Prize 2022; and an extract from her upcoming memoir, The Renegades: a story of Palestinian diaspora, was a finalist for the Narratively Memoir Prize 2022. Mai is also the recipient of the Master’s in Creative Writing FH Pasby Prize from the University of Oxford (2021).