In early 2025, fellow board member Lynn Sures invited me to serve as papermaker for Hand Papermaking’s 2025 Broadside. To coincide with the theme of this issue of the magazine, Lynn connected Hand Papermaking with poet Zeina Azzam, whose lyric voice, precise, generous, and deeply Palestinian, became the project’s pulse. Zeina’s poem moved like breath through this collaboration, carrying the ache of betweenness and the fragrance of remembered land. We invited Eileen Wallace to print the edition; she is Principal Lecturer at University of Georgia–Athen’s Lamar Dodd School of Art, teaching letterpress, book arts, and hand papermaking. Zeina then introduced Samar Hussaini, a Palestinian American artist based in New Jersey. From the first conversation, it felt less like assembling a team and more like discovering a shared language.

Poetry has always inspired me. The way poets bend language to make meaning is akin to how visual artists borrow form and material to summon feeling. Zeina’s lines set a rhythm that brought back vivid memories, the “Blue-green watery globe,” the “olive orchards, cypress trees...” of my childhood, and the scent of earth recalled from afar. Those sensations shaped the choices I made in designing and editioning the handmade paper for the piece.

During my residency at the Morgan Conservatory in Cleveland, I translated Zeina’s poem into paper. Over one month, I formed over 100 sheets: irregular ovals with a lighter abaca circle at the center, built from layers of cotton and abaca pigmented in khaki and green. Hidden within each sheet is a watermark inspired by the turquoise tile motifs of the Jameh Mosque of Yazd, invisible until lifted to light, a quiet symbol of memory and place.

When the sheets were ready, Eileen’s measured eye found the poem’s architecture; her letterpress impressions gave the language weight without burden. In dialogue with her, Samar’s cypress tree design is threaded through the text, rooted, upright, a figure of endurance. Eileen printed Samar’s image in clay umber from a polymer letterpress plate; Eileen also designed and printed the typography in blue-black ink. After the broadsides were printed, Samar applied tatreez stitches to each piece. Together, poem, paper, image, and type settled into one voice.

Colors for the Diaspora is an act of translation, between languages, materials, and identities. It embodies what I most value in Hand Papermaking: the meeting of craft and concept, tradition and innovation, and the simple, profound truth that making can be a form of homecoming.

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