Fresh Faculty: George Abraham

For the English department’s 2024 Writer-in-Residence George Abraham, art has the power to foster extraordinary community. From teaching poetry writing (and inventing a new poetic form) to practicing puppet-making to engaging in local activism, the Palestinian-American poet is not only committed to forging strong human connections during their time at Amherst, but also to providing us all with tools to build a better world for one another.

Honing their Craft

Abraham was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida, which, they quipped, is in “north Florida, i.e. southern Georgia.” As Abraham explained, “I was just a little queer, weird kid, and I would write poetry on the bus in my journal for fun. One day, a friend of mine was like, ‘Oh, I see that you’re writing with line breaks in your journal. That’s not prose, that’s a poem. You should come to the spoken word club.’” While Abraham was initially terrified of sharing their work with an audience, they eventually relented to their friend’s pestering and attended a club meeting.

“That completely changed my life. Spoken word and oral-embodied tradition is really my calling to poetry. I remember being young and watching these giants in spoken word like Suheir Hammad and Rafeef Ziadah — they were the first people I felt seen and understood by in a lot of ways, and they made me start thinking about how Palestinians can employ this art form.” Abraham has also been deeply inspired by Indigenous oral traditions and the legacy of Black American poets, including Danez Smith and June Jordan.

Abraham gained further understanding of the political and intellectual histories shaping poetic craft when they completed the Litowitz Master of Fine Arts (MFA) and Master of Arts (M.A.) Program in Creative Writing and English at Northwestern University. “It was a critical-creative hybrid program — through the critical side of the program, I leaned into ethnic studies and decolonial thought, especially Middle Eastern and North African Studies,” Abraham said. “My M.A. research essentially focused on Palestinian resistance literature. The fact that I could study Palestinian intellectual and literary history alongside doing the MFA really just shaped the contours of my entire creative experience. I think it’s helpful to be able to think about the intellectual side of the political questions that my work is considering, as well as the intellectual side of its aesthetic, formal questions.”

Abraham further asserted that their love for the Litowitz program stemmed from its incredible faculty, expressing particular gratitude for the guidance they received from Chris Abani, Daisy Hernández, Sarah Schulman, and Natasha Trethewey, who was the 19th United States poet laureate and visited Amherst during the 2024 LitFest. “Having these queer and BIPOC icons who I really look up to as my mentors and professors was really formative,” Abraham explained. “The best thing an MFA can give you is time with good people, and inshallah, it’s funded.”

Unexpected Outcomes

They did not always know they would dedicate their career to poetry. Abraham was a math and engineering double major at Swarthmore College and completed a master’s degree in bioengineering from Harvard University. “Back then, I wanted to protect my poetry from being my livelihood,” Abraham explained. “I do genuinely love science, but for a long time, I thought of it as my only way of making a living. I graduated intending to lead these dual lives, having poetry be completely outside of the institutional purview with science as my way through the institution.”

Eventually, however, Abraham found that “loving science and being a science researcher are two very different things.” As Abraham explained, “I realized I didn’t want to be in a pitch-black room doing neurophysiology experiments for eight hours a day. I just didn’t see a way to be myself and to be happy in this work.” Abraham further struggled with upholding their ethical values within a career in bioengineering, as many of the feasible pathways seemed to be entrenched within the pharmaceutical industry, large research institutions, or weapons manufacturing companies.

“What got me out of my science work, and how I funded my transition to creative writing graduate school, was adjuncting as a creative writing instructor,” said Abraham. “I realized that this was the kind of classroom I wanted to prioritize — this classroom contained true liberatory potential.”

While Abraham no longer spends all day working in a lab, math and science continue to significantly influence their life and creative work. “How I see the world cannot be divorced from my science background. When you read or listen to a poem, you’re spending time with how someone looks at and processes the world; science is the framework and filter of how I see everything.”

In fact, Abraham even invented a poetic form called the Markov Sonnet inspired by the Markov chain, which is a mathematical sequence where the probability of an event depends solely on the state of the previous event. In other words, “A leads to B leads to C, but A and C don’t have direct causal connections.” In adopting the Markov chain logic, Abraham’s new poetic form examines “what happens to the sonnet when we can only look at it in disembodied chunks.” As Abraham explained, “It puts a lot of pressure on the poem, and it puts pressure on the language and the images and the political imagination of the poem too. I’m interested in the way that form can probe these kinds of questions.”

Forging Community at Amherst

After spending so many years working at large research universities, Abraham is thrilled to be returning to their liberal arts roots during their time at Amherst. “I really think that liberal arts colleges have such a unique potential to form a truly liberating classroom,” said Abraham, who will be teaching the course Writing Poetry I in the fall semester. “Poetry workshopping is always better when we know each other, when we can see the human face behind the poem. It’s really hard to build an actual community in classrooms at larger universities, but at Amherst, these human connections are much easier to facilitate.”

However, it is not solely the liberal arts which have drawn Abraham to Amherst College. “I am very happy to be back in Massachusetts,” Abraham said, unable to contain a huge smile. “I used to live in Somerville, and so I have a weird nostalgia and fondness for Western Mass.”

Abraham is particularly excited to be close to Northampton’s publishing house Interlink Publishing, the only Palestinian-led press in the United States. “In the future, I’m designing courses in Palestinian literature, and now I’m able to consider how this literature exists within the context of Western Mass.”

The prominence of Palestinian thought in our region draws Abraham back to one of their most essential concerns, which is “how we are connecting people locally to what is really just beyond our doorsteps.” As Abraham explained, “We think of these international, geopolitical crises as ‘over there,’ but I promise you, it is right here too. When considering the genocide in Gaza right now, we must recognize that we are actively living in a settler-colonial nation that was founded on many genocides. How can we learn with and build with our kin here, especially our Black and Indigenous kin, who know these shapes of colonial slaughter because they’ve had to survive them for hundreds of years?”

Last weekend, Abraham spoke at the 2024 Socialism Conference and was moved by activist Linda Sarsour’s assertion that “all politics is local.” For Abraham, “It was a good reminder that yes, we can vent and have anxiety about politics at the national level, but let’s focus. Let’s come back to our doorstep. Let’s come back to our people. What are we doing here and now to build a better world for each other?”

Fostering productive, restorative communities is not only one of Abraham’s primary goals for their time at Amherst but also something they nurture in their personal life. “I’ve been prioritizing building spaces to gather and get organized with my community. The revolution is in our homes as well, and when we're cooking with each other and doing non-work things together, we are actually forging a stronger community.”

Abraham is also currently editing the award-winning Southwest Asian and North African literary journal “Mizna” and working on a play with their good friend and fellow Palestinian artist Fargo Tbakhi. This piece, which started as a pandemic project and has fostered Abraham’s newfound passion for building puppets, tells “a Palestinian version of ‘Paradise Lost.’” Abraham explained, “Milton has such a crazy biography — he was part of a whole effort to behead a king of England but also witnessed the way that the monarchy reinstated itself just within years of this. And so even though ‘Paradise Lost’ is this really gorgeously written, scripturally-interested text, it is also a text thinking about how we continue and go on in the aftermath of a failed revolution. Our play, titled ‘Eve,’ is not only borrowing and shattering structures from ‘Paradise Lost’ into a contemporary Palestinian moment but also thinking about how we keep each other going in this aftermath.”

Abraham highlighted the Palestinian idea of “sumud,” which encompasses “the spirit of this kind of steadfast resilience, of collective-oriented resistance that the Palestinian people have to embody.” For Abraham, the people suffering in Gaza right now are the definition of resilience. “If they can do that, then us on the U.S. side — regardless of our disillusionments and moments of sheer despair — have to keep going too,” said Abraham. “There's nothing less than the whole world at stake here.”

Abraham’s work, both inside and outside the classroom, crucially asks us to consider, “How do we keep going when the world is imploding beneath us?” and “How do we love each other better through this struggle?”

In the coming year, Abraham hopes to form strong connections with individuals from all corners of the Amherst community. They stressed that they are available to all community members and encouraged everyone to reach out, whether to discuss bioengineering, revolutionary poetic forms, or the joy of puppet building.