Editors:
MATTHEW CASSEL is a journalist and photographer covering the Middle East for Al Jazeera English. Cassel first learned about the region through his human rights and media work in Palestinian refugee camps. Over the past decade he has worked in the occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Bahrain and elsewhere. Formerly Assistant Editor of the The Electronic Intifada online journal, he is connected to activists, journalists, writers, artists and others at the forefront of the movement for change in the region.
LAYLA AL-ZUBAIDI is Director of the Heinrich Boll Foundation in South Africa, and was previously based in Beirut and Ramallah. She has published on cultural resistance and freedom of expression, and is co-editor of Democratic Transition in the Middle East: Unmaking Power (Routledge, 2012). She is also on the Executive Committee of Freemuse?World Forum on Music and Censorship.
NEMONIE CRAVEN RODERICK is a literary agent. She has contributed to Sight & Sound, Roads & Kingdoms and The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, amongst other publications.
Authors:
ALI ALDAIRY is a Bahraini researcher, linguist and cultural critic, interested in philosophy and religion. He is the author of several books and maintains his own website (//aldairy.ws). As a long standing activist he has been struggling since the Bahraini uprising in 2011 and was forced to leave the country. In exile he founded the online Arabic newspaper Mira’at al-Bahrain (The Bahrain Mirror).
SAFA AL AHMAD is a Saudi freelance journalist based in the Middle East. She has worked both in print and for TV, for major channels in the region, and was a finalist for the 2012 Rory Peck awards for freelance journalism. With the start of the second intifada she traveled to Palestine, then on to Lebanon, Bahrain, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Libya, among others.
KHAWLA DUNIA is a lawyer, writer and researcher from Damascus, a member of the editorial board of The Damascus Center for Theoretical Studies and Civil Rights. She has published several studies, including Syrian Women between Reality and Ambition, Report on the Damascus Declaration Detainees and reports on elections and political issues. She is now active in the protests and writes about them on the Arabic website Safhat Suriya (Syria Pages).
JAMAL JUBRAN is a journalist, poet and author, based in Sanaa. He regularly contributes to Beirut-based Al-Akhbar English and his articles have been translated and published in a number of international publications. He also has taught at Sanaa University, but was expelled because of his political activities. Before and during the Yemeni uprising, he was active in the group around Nobel peace laureate Tawakkul Karman.
MOHAMED MESRATI was born in 1990 in Tripoli, Libya. He is a writer and activist, and an extract from his novel-in-progress Mama Pizza appeared in Banipal No. 40.
GHANIA MOUFFOK is a journalist based in Algiers. She is a correspondent for TV5 MONDE and hosts the blog Une femme a sa fenetre (A Woman at her Window) on the channel’s website. She writes for various journals, including Le Monde Diplomatique, the Swiss La Liberte, and the Algerian online-journal Maghreb Emergent. She is also an engaged feminist and human rights activist and collaborates with the UN and civil society organizations. Among her publications are Une autre voie pour l’Algerie (with Louisa Hanoune, 1995), Etre journaliste en Algerie (1996) and Apprendre a vivre ensemble (2011).
YASMINE EL RASHIDI is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and a contributing editor to the Middle East arts and culture quarterly Bidoun. A collection of her
