A.D. Lauren-Abunassar is a Palestinian-American writer, poet, and journalist. Her work has appeared in POETRY, Narrative, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Boulevard, and elsewhere. Her first book, Coriolis, was winner of the 2023 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. She was a 2025 NEA fellow in poetry.
A.D. Lauren-Abunassar will be working on a hybrid lyric poetry manuscript, “In Dreams I am Always a Horse,” which is a study of diasporic identity-making, retelling the immigration of Lauren-Abunassar’s family from Palestine to the U.S. With poems spanning a wide range of forms— including embedded video and sound poems, textual maps, and self-erasures— the project will grapple with notions of inheritance and how one must grapple constantly with history lost and preserved. How is meaning made, identity forged, often in the aftermath of violence or journeys that have been forced by the reach of colonial violence? How might dream and archive serve as forms of ancestral wellness practice? These questions are at the heart of “In Dreams I am Always a Horse,” as is the question of how storytelling might function as a way to resist erasure.