Organizers of the upcoming Palestine 5K Run/Walk through the West Bank city of Birzeit, near Ramallah, have big goals. They hope the event will not only help build strong, local programs for Palestinian children, but will most importantly create a sense of community and belonging among people. 

The idea of writing about something very personal is haunting me. As a Palestinian, it’s really hard to know where to draw the line between the political and the personal. But, in Palestine, the personal is political and the political is the personal. For now, I’ll keep the political away and dig down into the personal.

My blog Live from Gaza has been an outlet for me to write some simple and humble accounts coming from a very ordinary person living under extraordinary circumstances.

Being a woman from Gaza formed the person that I am today. 

Federico García Lorca lived in Manhattan from 1929 to 1930, and the poetry he wrote about the city, Poet in New York, was posthumously published in 1940. Eighty years after Lorca's sojourn in America, and myself a poet in New York of Middle Eastern as well as Mediterranean roots, I went to Spain to write Poet in Andalucía. I recreated Lorca's journey in reverse. Poet in Andalucía is a meditation on the past and the present. 

Although Elmaz was born into a Lebanese family, she lived in the US her whole life. Most of her work (Children of the Roojme, a Family's Journey from Lebanon, In the Country of my Dreams) centers on Arabs or Arab-Americans coping and dealing with antagonistic measures present in their daily lives. It was interesting to see where this particular theme fit within her experience of teaching for the first time in the occupied West Bank, and her perspective on the role of creative writing in Palestine.  

Thirteen Departures From the Moon (Press 53, March 2011) is the debut book of poems by acclaimed Palestinian-American poet and editor Deema Shehabi. Shehabi's book of poems, which are aesthetically crafted and tell the Palestinian narrative, can be pre-purchased through . 

Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between (Just World Books, November 4 2010), is the first book by political analyst and social activist Laila El-Haddad. El-Haddad, a Palestinian from Gaza City, chronicles her experiences as a journalist, activist, and mother from the years 2004-2010 in her new book which can now be purchased on Amazon.com. 

Palestinian-American professor and author Karam Dana is the co-principal investigator of the Muslim American Public Opinion Survey (MAPOS), the largest survey of Muslims living in the United States. Troubled by rising Islamophobia and the lack of reliable information about American Muslims, Dana launched MAPOS in 2007 to study the patterns of social, civic, and political participation among Muslim Americans. 

Palestinian-American physician and poet Fady Joudah will be honored with the prestigious PEN USA 2010 Literary Award for his translation of the late Mahmoud Darwish's work If I Were Another. The award, which has been presented to writers such as Woody Allen and Ray Bradbury, has honored exceptional work by authors in 10 different genres for the last 20 years.