Zena Agha is a Palestinian-Iraqi writer and poet from London. She previously served as the US Policy Fellow for Al-Shabaka: the Palestinian Policy Network based in New York and is currently a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington D.C where her areas of expertise include climate change and Palestinian adaptive capabilities, Israeli spatial practices and colonial cartography. Zena’s media credits include the BBC World Service, Voice of America, and BBC Arabic. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships including the Library Innovation Lab at the Harvard Law School and she was awarded the Kennedy Scholarship to complete her Masters at Harvard University.
Zena was a 2018-2019 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writer’s Workshop. Her poetry collection, ‘Objects from April and May’, was a finalist for the Alice James Book Award and the Omnidawn First/Second Book Prize. She founded Warwick University’s largest poetry collective ‘Shoot from the Lip and has performed poetry around the US, UK and France. Zena’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The Independent, Foreign Affairs, The Margins, NPR and El País.
