Arab Women Voice New Realities presents an archive of living, breathing stories of women making promises and confessions, women coming to terms with traumatic pasts, negotiating complex present realities, and imagining alternative liberating futures. This collection attempts to bridge the gap among women writers, seasoned and novice. It spans a large geographical space, uncovers the depth of distinct experiences, and ultimately offers a platform for voice and visibility to the new Arab woman. These stories are instantiations, records, and they will never be told in the same way again. Seldom do we get the chance to see a literary project through in a relatively short period of time, especially one which involves many writers, translators, artists, designers and publishing members.

    Khoury-Ghata's book, published in her eighty-first year, is testimony to this Lebanese poet's enduring brilliance. Earlier translations by Hacker were described by Alica Ostriker as emerging 'from the embers of loss and death, from childhood and the moon, from villages and cemeteries and forests, geography and God'. In two moving sequences, we find Khoury-Ghata's voice retuning to familiar themes of death, intimacy, enforced silence and the surreal horror of war. Rendered faithfully and exquisitely by Hacker's concise eye, the poems mark an important contribution to world poetry in translation.

    The author examines how Hizbullah has altered its institutional structure and reconstructed Lebanese Shi'a history in a manner similar to that of nationalist movements. Through fieldwork and research, the project finds that Hizbullah has centralized around the concept of Wilayat al-Fagih (Gaurdianship of the Islamic Jurists): in essence, the absolute authority of Iran's Supreme Leader over the Shi'a "nation."