Announcing a new book to come—please direct questions to Gudrun Hebel at the Agentur Literatur in Berlin and Soumeya Roberts at HG Agency, New York. The German-language rights have been sold to Literaturverlag Droschl in Graz, Austria.
Monthly Archives: February 2019
Facts Become the Enemy: Art and Archives. A Conversation with Joy Garnett on “The Bee Kingdom”
Joy Amina Garnett is an Egyptian American artist and writer living in New York. Her work, which spans creative writing, painting, installation art, and social media-based projects, reflects how past, present, and future narratives can co-exist through ‘the archive’ in its various forms. She has been working on a memoir and several other projects around the life and work of her late grandfather, the Egyptian Romantic poet and bee scientist A.Z. Abushady (1892–1955).
Joy Garnett: “Growing up, his ghost was all around me, the stuff of fairy tales, but I didn’t have a real sense of him as a person. My mother and aunt put him on a pedestal—their father, the famous Egyptian poet and doctor. Much literary criticism has been written about his poetry, so I spent years reading and absorbing as much as I could while trying to put together a more intimate and complex picture of him. As an undergraduate, I studied classical and spoken Arabic, and recently I took a series of hands-on beekeeping classes.”
Read the conversation here.