Set in the West Bank, Isabella Hammad’s novel Enter Ghost (2023) tells the story of a British-Palestinian actress who returns to Haifa to stage a performance of Hamlet in the West Bank. Isabella uses theater as a metaphor and as a narrative device to navigate the dilemmas of identity, homecoming, and the broader tensions of a Palestinian society living under occupation.
So it’s perhaps unsurprising that she would be interested in the work of Ismail Khalidi, a Palestinian-American playwright and director.
Ismail’s plays are brought together in his newest book, Until I Return: The Selected Plays of Ismail Khalidi (Bloomsbury, 2025). His early mono-dramas, as well as his newer plays, travel through Palestine’s history and tell stories about the defiant life-affirming practices of its people. He situates the Palestinian play as a register of life and a tool of storytelling able to transcend the limitations and blockades regularly imposed on Palestinian narration.
The playwright Naomi Wallace writes that “this collection of plays is original, disruptive, and pulls no punches when it comes to staging the human intricacies, not to mention intimacies, of colonialism and war… Here you have a body of work that refuses to trade in easy political rhetoric or clichés.”
In this event, Ismail asks the actor John Early and the filmmaker Hind Shoufani to animate the characters of his plays with a performed reading of excerpts. Isabella then joins Ismail in conversation.
Co-presented by the Center for Palestine Studies and the Palestine Festival of Literature at Giorno Poetry Systems.
ISABELLA HAMMAD
GIVES THE STAGE TO
ISMAIL KHALIDI
March 3, 2026
7:00 PM — Doors
7:30 PM — Event Start
Giorno Poetry Systems
222 Bowery
New York, NY 10012
Tickets to this event are free and open to the public. This evening doubles as a fundraiser for Omar Hamad's library project in Gaza. Donations are highly encouraged. Click here to donate.
Isabella Hammad (b. 1991, London) is a British-Palestinian novelist. Her debut 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. Her second novel Enter Ghost (2023) received the Encore Award and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Her book-length essay Recognizing the Stranger (2024), was longlisted for the 2024 NBCC Award for Criticism.
Ismail Khalidi (b. 1982, Beirut) is a playwright and director. His plays include Tennis in Nablus (Alliance Theatre), Truth Serum Blues (Pangea World Theater), Foot (Teatro Amal), Sabra Falling (Pangea World Theater), Dead Are My People (Noor Theatre), and The Magic Bullet (co-writer, Lub Dub).
Khalidi has written three plays with Naomi Wallace, adapting Ghassan Kanafani's Returning to Haifa (Finborough Theatre) and Sinan Antoon's The Corpse Washer (Actors Theatre of Louisville), as well as the one-act, Visions from the Center of the Earth (Ashtar Theatre). His plays have been published in numerous anthologies, including Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora (TCG), which he co-edited. Khalidi holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and has been a past artist-in-residence at Teatro Amal (Chile), Mizna, and Boston University's Center on Forced Displacement. He is currently a Directing Fellow at Pangea World Theater.
John Early is currently starring in Wallace Shawn’s new play What We Did Before Our Moth Days directed by Andre Gregory. His directorial debut Maddie’s Secret opened the Discovery section of the Toronto International Film Festival in 2025 and will be released by Magnolia Pictures in 2026. Early received Emmy and Critics’ Choice nominations for his HBO stand-up special Now More Than Ever, and also for Would It Kill You to Laugh? (A24), a sketch comedy special he created and stars in with frequent collaborator Kate Berlant. He produced and starred in the film Stress Positions (Neon) directed by Theda Hammel. In 2018 Early produced a revival of Wallace Shawn’s play Marie and Bruce, and in 2019 he directed Jacqueline Novak’s Off Broadway show Get On Your Knees. He played Elliott Goss for five seasons on HBO Max’s Search Party.
Hind Shoufani (b. 1978, Lebanon) is an Oscar-nominated Palestinian-American filmmaker, writer, & poet. She holds an MFA in film from NYU as a Fulbright scholar and has been publishing and performing poetry and prose since 2006. Hind has directed, produced, and edited documentaries, museum films, video art and fiction for over 25 years. Her first feature film, Trip Along Exodus, screened in over 40 cities and her short Heavy Metal, opened at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2023. She has a BAFTA for the short film The Present. Diode Editions published her poetry collection, Dark Star Requiem, in 2025.