A powerful act of remembrance and resistance, 70,000 transforms cultural erasure into a living, breathing archive of grief, memory, and hope.

70,000 is a visceral and inventive poetry collection inspired by the removal of approximately 70,000 books from Palestinian homes and private libraries before and during the events of 1948. Of those books, most have not been returned; about 6,000 remain housed in Israeli national collections, where they are largely inaccessible to Palestinians.

In response to this loss of cultural and intellectual heritage, Lenna Jawdat began handwriting the numbers one to 70,000, choosing to imagine each number as a book. Trained as a trauma therapist, she documented the emotional and physical experience of this ritual, tracing the grief, reverence, and endurance that surfaced through the process. This full-color book unfolds through three interwoven threads: the numbers themselves, reflections on the act of writing, and a personal and familial poetic narrative expressed in both image and verse. Together, they form a fragmented yet powerful archive—blending poetry, memoir, maps, documents, and collage.

70,000 is an embodied meditation on cultural displacement, memory, and resilience. What begins as a personal act of witnessing becomes a collective gesture toward remembrance, continuity, and the possibility of healing.

Lenna Jawdat is a poet, writer, and psychotherapist of Palestinian and Iraqi descent. Her poetry and flash nonfiction has been published in Poet Lore, The Massachusetts Review, The Margins, Chapter House Journal, and elsewhere. She was a 2021 Best of the Net nominee and artist in residence at Sundress Academy for the Arts (2023) and Vermont Studio Center (2025). Lenna received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in May 2024. A native Washingtonian, she lives on ancestral Anacostan land with her partner and two cats. 70,000 is her first book.