Noor Theatre

Zeyn joukhadar

he/they

Two Fun Facts: I'm a classically trained singer; I sang semi-professionally as a lyric soprano throughout my twenties, and I'm currently continuing my training as a bass. I'm also a recovering scientist with a PhD in epigenetic.

What inspired you to adapt the work to the theatre, and how has the page to stage process been for you so far? The process of art-making is central to the novel, as are the artistic coming-of-ages of the contemporary trans protagonist, Nadir, and Laila Z. Much of the novel is dedicated to visual and performance art and artists, from Artemisia Gentileschi to Etel Adnan to Roman Opałka, and I often found myself betraying language to get at the raw sensations bricked in behind the words. The story is also a love letter to the New York I grew up in; I can’t wait to see what nuances theater as a form and the city itself will bring to this story.

About the Commissioned Piece: I'm adapting my second novel, The Thirty Names of Night, as an immersive theater piece set in New York City. Nadir, the protagonist of Thirty Names, is a Syrian American trans Muslim searching for the connection between his late ornithologist mother and the mysteriously vanished bird artist Laila Z, who both encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. Following his mother’s ghost, Nadir uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community and learns that Laila Z’s secrets are intimately tied to his family's--and his own--in ways he never could have expected.

Bio: Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the Lambda Literary- and Stonewall Book Award-winning novel The Thirty Names of Night as well as The Map of Salt and Stars, which won the Middle East Book Award and was a Goodreads Choice Awards and Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize finalist. His work has appeared in Electric Literature, Salon, The Paris Review, [PANK], and elsewhere and has been included in anthologies such as Letters to a Writer of Color, This Arab Is Queer, Kink, and others. He has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Joukhadar serves on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and mentors emerging writers of color with the Periplus Collective.

Check out Zeyn's socials: 
Twittter: @ZeynJoukhadar 
IG: @Zeyn_Joukhadar 
Facebook: zeynjoukhadarauthor