Writer-In-Service Award

Rashida Abulhadi is the 2023 recipient of the Lillian E. Smith Writer-in-Service Award. This award is sponsored annually by a generous gift by Sue Ellen Lovejoy, a member of the LES Center Advisory Board. This award provides an opportunity for those writers who, like Lillian E. Smith, recognize “the power of the arts to transform the lives of all human beings.” Recipients receive an honorarium, travel allowance, and a two-week residency at the Center. The following is Abulhadi on receiving the award.

In this time of multiple escalating global crises, having the dedicated time and support of a residency at the Lillian E. Smith Center is a heartily welcomed respite and a sweet return to one of the places I come from.

I am looking forward to using my time to work on my first full-length book of poetry and spend some time on the mountain reflecting on what is, improbably, already two decades of community organizing and cultural work. After prioritizing almost everything else over publishing my own writing, I confess I’m bolting a bit, sending out a puff of seeds. The crises of the pandemic, radical escalation of eliminatory violence against and academic censorship of Palestinians, and a new disability diagnosis have sharpened my sense of urgency about what interventions my writing, my life might make.

My organizing experiences also shape my book-inprogress, — Baba al-Bab, or My Father the Door —. The poems map the land-mined terrain of multiple escalating political, social, and ecological crises, and the collection is a synthesis of personal and political history, present, and futures. In it, I try to reckon with archives both public and personal, newspapers to family photo albums, with ecologies of doom and magic, mourning the lost, mapping escape routes, building Indigenous postcolonial futurisms, and, I hope, preserving some recipes for healing.

The gift of time at any residency is always precious. Doubly so to have time in Southern Appalachia, a place that means so much. Working on a book with content this intense requires periods of recovery and metabolism — not just of information and research — but of the implications of historical violence and present crises. My current experience of Long Covid disability means that my work also has to follow the demands, limits, and unscheduled insights of chronic illness.

As a disabled writer writing about disability and the unjust conditions that create disability and debility, my work benefits from longer residencies to accommodate these rhythms of rest, research, digestion, writing, and recovery. I dearly welcome a residency in community with others who understand community work and artistic practice as deeply linked.

I have dearly missed the South and my home state of Georgia. As a writer who engaged with ecology, environmental justice, and Indigenous lineages, being able to work in regions of the South I know well deeply nourishes my work and reflection. I am so grateful to return to familiar forests as a grounding for creative work about my own experiences of the Southeast.

Receiving this year’s Writer-In-Service honors from The Lillian E. Smith Center puts me humbly in line with colleagues and elders whose work and lives have guided me. That sense of connection and meaning feels especially precious, especially now. The safety to create uncensored work to honor my queer, trans, disabled, Palestinian, Muslim, Southern, and Indigenous identities and communities feels full of transformative possibility in this time of escalating global crises. I welcome this refuge in which to work at a sustainable pace and, in turn, offer support and care for organizers and artists in my communities so they, too, can survive and thrive.