Episode 1: Ahmad Almallah
Are the elements of a city that remind a person of home or their estrangement too personal for others to understand?
In Episode 1 of Season 2, we accompany Palestinian poet Ahmad Almallah as he walks home from The Fabric Workshop and Museum through the streets of Philadelphia, contemplating ideas of family, language, home, estrangement, and the magic of a big white dog.
About Ahmad Almallah
Ahmad Almallah is a poet from Palestine. His first book of poems Bitter English is now available in the Phoenix Poets Series from the University of Chicago Press. He received the Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize for Creative Writing, and his set of poems “Recourse,” won the Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship. Some of his poems appeared in Jacket2, Track//Four, All Roads Will Lead You Home, Apiary, Supplement, SAND, Michigan Quarterly Review, Making Mirrors: Righting/Writing by Refugees, Cordite Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Great River Review. He holds a PhD in Arabic Literature from Indiana University Bloomington and an MFA in poetry from Hunter College. He currently lives in Philadelphia and teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania.
About Halftone
Halftone comes to you from The Fabric Workshop and Museum and is presented in connection with Bitter Fruit, an exhibition by artist Ahmed Alsoudani. This season of Halftone and Bitter Fruit are supported by Maja Paumgarten Parker and John Parker.
Halftone is produced by Katie Parry and Alec Unkovic, engineered by Joel Metzler at MilkBoy the Studio. Our music was contributed by Char McCutcheon. Special thanks to our collaborators Ahmad Almallah and Ana Mosquera, as well as our visitor services team members Kristina Centore, Olivia Dwyer, and George MacLeod, who contributed reflections about the exhibition to this episode. Find more information at
