Nawal is a Lebanese-Ghanaian immigrant, poet, educator, and editor, and the author of a record of how the mother’s textile became sound(NOEMI 2023). Her manuscript, an improvised song is likely to come apart and scatter in infinite directions, was a finalist in both the University of Pittsburgh’s 2021 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Book Prize and the 2021 Autumn House Press Full-Length Poetry Contest. Her work also appears or is forthcoming in: the minnesota review, North American Review, RHINO, Fence, Texas Review, Bayou Magazine and elsewhere. Nawal serves as an editor for Inverted Syntax Press and is affiliate faculty at Regis University teaching in the Undergraduate English program and the Master of Arts in Literature specialization. About her poem, “textile as presence in absence,” Nawal writes, “After my mother died there was a silence everywhere and it felt like a new language or maybe like a new way to enter language. I remembered reading somewhere about those who had experienced suffering, who are multilingual, rarely speak in the language in which the suffering occurred. I thought I was learning the language I was grieving in, but it was also learning a language of continuity, my mother’s continuity through alteration, speaking in altered form. I wanted my mother to resist disappearing, and like the other poems in the book, this poem is a desperate cry for her to live.”