Wherever You Are: Essays from East to West (Preorder)

*PREORDER*
Estimated publication date: Late 2026
Exact publication date forthcoming

Wherever You Are: Essays from East to West gathers the meditations of a writer caught between worlds—Palestinian by blood, American by circumstance, and by temperament a stranger to easy belonging. In these essays, Yahia Lababidi moves between high and low, sacred and mundane, resisting the comfort of choosing. He writes of Oscar Wilde and belly dancers, of Rumi and Ramadan television, of raising pigeons on a Florida balcony while the world burns in Gaza—composing a spiritual autobiography disguised as cultural criticism, in which attention becomes a kind of devotion and prayer. Through it all runs a single question: how to remain fully alive and human in a wounded world?

These are essays in the truest sense, explorations that circle and return, admitting uncertainty while insisting on witness. Lababidi writes with the care of a poet and the conscience of a dissident. He does not offer answers so much as company: of thinkers, artists, and ordinary people who have refused to be diminished by their circumstances. A life of letters, he suggests, is a form of resistance. And in a time of noise and simplification, the whisper—tender and precise, scandalous with truth—may be the only honest response.

This title will be released under Ayin's sibling imprint Aora Books. 

About the Author

Yahia Lababidi is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, aphorisms, and essays. His work has appeared in esteemed publications such as World Literature Today, AGNI, and The Best American Poetry. His most recent books include On the Contrary (Fomite Press, 2025) and Palestine Wail (Daraja Press, 2024). Poetry from Palestine Wail has been translated into multiple languages and twice-nominated for a Pushcart Prize.