Isabella Hammad in Conversation with Namwali Serpell

The Cambridge Public Library will host Isabella Hammad for a conversation about her latest book, Enter Ghost, with Namwali Serpell, author of The Furrows: An Elegy, on September 14 from 6-7:30 p.m. This event is free and hybrid, and registration is required. This event is sponsored by the Cambridge Public Library Foundation. 

Enter Ghost follows actress Sonia as she returns to Palestine to visit her sister after years away and takes a role in a West Bank production of Hamlet. Enter Ghost is a story of diaspora, displacement, and the connection to be found in family and shared resistance. 

Namwali Serpell's The Furrows: An Elegy details Cassandra’s journey after the loss of her younger brother. The Furrows captures the experience of grief and how memory and mourning can distort reality. The Furrows is a bold exploration of memory and mourning that twists unexpectedly into a story of mistaken identity, double consciousness, and the wishful—and sometimes willful—longing for reunion with those we’ve lost. 

Isabella Hammad’s writing has appeared in the Paris Review, the New York Times, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. She was awarded the 2018 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and a 2019 O. Henry Prize. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree. Her first novel The Parisian (2019) won a Palestine Book Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Betty Trask Award from the Society of Authors in the UK.  

Namwali Serpell’s debut novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. The Furrows was a named finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, listed as one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Serpell is currently a professor of English at Harvard. 

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