Zena Agha

Zena Agha is a Palestinian Iraqi writer, poet, and multidisciplinary artist from London. She is the author of Objects from April and May (Hajar Press, 2022), and her short film, The Place that is Ours, was selected for several international festivals. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The Independent, Foreign Affairs, The Margins, NPR, and El País. Zena was awarded the Kennedy Scholarship to undertake a Master’s in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University and completed her doctorate on colonial cartography in Palestine at Newcastle University.

Articles by Zena Agha

Sand Under the Foundation: A Conversation with Joe Sacco

In this incisive interview, Zena Agha speaks to one of the world's greatest cartoonists and journalists, Joe Sacco. They talk about his 2003 book, Palestine, in the context of the ongoing genocide, his most recent release, The Once and Future Riot (2025), which investigates the 2013 Muzaﬀarnagar communal riots in India, and other work from across his decades-long career. Speaking openly about his positionality and experiences as a journalist and outsider to regions he covers, Sacco opens up about the brutality he has witnessed firsthand, the loss of hope, US foreign policy, settler logic, journalistic ethics, and more, in a conversation at once deeply personal and sharply political. This is an extract from Wasafiri 127: Solidarities.

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