PEN and ACLU Press for Visa for Ghassan Zaqtan

Ghassan Zaqtan, leading Palestinian poet due to be a guest of the Writers Institute on this coming Tuesday, April 10th, has been prevented from launching his U.S. book tour because of unexplained State Department delays in processing his VISA application.

The situation has attracted the attention of PEN and the ACLU:

PEN Presses for Visa for Palestinian Poet

April 4, 2012 Larry Siems

Yesterday, we got word through our Translation Committee that Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan, whose collection Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me is being released by Yale University Press this month, is still waiting for a visa to travel to the U.S. for a planned two-week book tour. The tour was to kick off yesterday with an event featuring Zaqtan and Fady Joudah, his translator, at Claremont McKenna College in California, followed by readings at UCLA today and the San Francisco State University Poetry Center tomorrow.

Worried that the United States might been delaying visa processing for political reasons, PEN joined with the ACLU, our partners in challenging a number of post-9/11 instances of ideological exclusion to send a letter to U.S. State Department Legal Advisor Harold Koh asking for urgent action on Zaqtan’s visa application. It is our hope that Zaqtan will receive a visa in time to participate in an April 9 event at the University of Houston and subsequent planned events at SUNY Albany, Columbia, Georgetown, Poets House in New York, and Yale University.

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