Launch of Lebanese American Maha Hashwi's THE POMEGRANATE IS A GRENADE (with Pacinthe Mattar)

A place to belong for anyone caught between cultures, countries, or selves.

The Pomegranate is a Grenade is a debut poetry collection that examines what it means to grow up Arab and Muslim in the United States, where home is both inherited and continually reshaped. Maha Hashwi draws from the textures of an immigrant household—food shared across generations, religious traditions carried forward, the weight of displacement, and the small, steady acts of love that hold a family together.

Hashwi’s poems move between personal narrative and cultural memory, exploring how identity changes with time, migration, and the stories passed down through parents and community. She writes of resistance, tenderness, and the contradictions of belonging to more than one place, offering readers a vivid look at the emotional landscape of the diaspora.

Honest, accessible, and rooted in lived experience, this collection invites readers into the rooms, rituals, and relationships that shape a life between countries—and asks what we carry, and what carries us, when we call more than one place home.

Maha Hashwi is a writer and spoken word poet whose work explores the complexities of growing up Lebanese American in Dearborn, Michigan. Unapologetic in her identity as a Muslim and Arab woman, she writes at the intersection of culture, faith, family, and belonging. She leads a community writing workshop, Anyone Can Write, encouraging people of all backgrounds to put their stories on the page. Maha has participated in the Aspen Institute’s Summer Words Writers Conference in Poetry and the Tin House Winter Workshop. She now lives in New York City.

Pacinthe Mattar is an Egyptian-Canadian writer, journalist and producer.