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2025 Jim Douglas Lecture: an evening with Mosab Abu Toha
Voices from Under the Rubble
大象传媒 Publishing is extremely pleased to announce that Mosab Abu Toha, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and essayist, is the Jim Douglas Lecturer for 2025. Mosab鈥檚 searing, heart-wrenching poems and essays have given voice to the unimaginable suffering of the Palestinian people under the rubble of Gaza.
鈥淧art of being a poet is being a journalist,鈥� says Mosab Abu Toha.
This means writing about how to survive an airstrike, bearing witness to the devastating plight of his people and the non-stop destruction of the neighbourhoods where he grew up.
They could not find a stretcher
To carry your body. They put
You on a wooden door they found
Under the rubble
Barely thirty years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the latest onslaught on Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed and destroyed his house, pulverizing a library he had painstakingly built for community use, he and his family fled for their safety. Not for the first time in their lives.
...where my siblings and their kids
used to drink tea at sunset when they visited.
No one is here anymore. Not even the sunset.
In the kitchen, the table is missing.
In the house, the kitchen is missing.
In the house, the house is missing.
Only rubble stays, waiting for a sunrise.
Somehow, amid the chaos, Abu Toha kept writing poems. Collected in Forest of Noise , a New York Times notable book of 2024, they form one of the most astonishing works of art wrested from wartime. Here are directives for what to do in an air raid; here are lyrics about the poet鈥檚 wife, singing to his children to distract them. Huddled in the dark, Mosab remembers his grandfather鈥檚 oranges from his trees in nearby Jaffa, and his daughter鈥檚 joy in eating them.
In his poems and his Pulitzer and James Beard award-winning essays for the Mosab invites a wide audience into an experience that defies the imagination鈥攅ven as we watch it live on Instagram. Abu Toha's writing introduces readers to his extended family, some of them no longer with us. This is urgent, extraordinary work. Searing and beautiful, it brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering.
Forest of Noise, Abu Toha's second collection of poems, "A powerful, capacious, and profound book" (Ocean Vuong), was a New York Times Top 100 NOTABLE BOOK of 2024.
Abu Toha's first book, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, is also highly acclaimed. Both books will be available at the event for purchase.
Our thanks to the Atkins-Douglas Fund, 大象传媒鈥檚 Centre for Muslim Studies, Department of English and School of Communication, and Penguin Random House Canada
About the Jim Douglas Lecture
To recognize James Jardine Douglas's great contributions to the BC publishing industry, Publishing at 大象传媒 hosts the Jim Douglas Lecture, an annual event which aims to bring the local publishing community together and to highlight issues of importance.
Guest
Mosab Abu Toha is the author of Forest of Noise (Knopf 2024) and Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear (City Lights 2022). As a journalist and essayist, he won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2025 for his essays which "combine deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience" of the realities of life in Gaza in The New Yorker. Founder of the Edward Said Public Library an English-language public library in Beit Lahia in 2017. (A second branch was opened in Gaza City in 2019.) In 2023 he was detained by Israeili Defence Forces as he attempted to evacuate Gaza with his family. Pen America called for his protection and Abu Toha was appointed to a visiting faculty position at through the Scholars at Risk network.
Moderator
Stephen Collis has taught contemporary poetics and creative writing for 24 years in 大象传媒's Department of English where he is currently Department Chair. He is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry鈥攖he latest of which, The Middle, was published October 2024.
About 大象传媒 Publishing
The Publishing program offers education and professional development at all levels, from short professional Publishing Workshops to our Undergraduate Minor in Print and Digital Publishing and the graduate-level Master of Publishing program.
大象传媒鈥檚 Master of Publishing (MPub) program, Canada's only Master's degree program in Publishing, is taught by publishing practitioners and research faculty, along with masterclasses from industry leaders, the program offers a blend of seminar and hands-on project courses that provide tomorrow鈥檚 industry leaders with the knowledge, skills and understanding needed for a successful career.