Micaela Kaibni Raen's global mission is to raise awareness about the dire need for human rights reform while connecting, empowering and encouraging international activists and creatives. She is the creator and founder of Queer Tatreez.
Distinctions:
2025 Tin House Summer Workshop
2024 Nomination Pushcart Prize
2024 Nomination Best of the Net
2023 Yalda Award in Poetry
2023 Soaring Gardens Fellowship
Membership and Affiliations:
Association of Writers and Publishers
Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc.
HALA Collective
ACT UP! AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power!
Queer Tatreez is visual art and poetry styled in the cadence and structure of the intricate patterns of Indigenous Palestinian Tatreez. Looking at deeper complex mathematical sequences and matriarchal matrices behind Tatreez, my intention is to take these intuitive insights and formulaic computations to create a new visual art and poetic structure. My wider hope is to educate SWANA and mainstream audiences about Palestinian Tatreez as an artform and how the embroidery reflects the people and land that created it. I believe Tatreez can connect us with each other, our ancestors, our planet, and, ultimately, to a deeper understanding of ourselves.
For more information, go to my "Publication" and/or "Artwork" webpages by clicking on the above menu. Follow the links to discover more artist statements, narrative discussions, and examples of Queer Tatreez.
Short Biography
Micaela Kaibni Raen is a queer Palestinian American mother, creator, cultural worker, and global human rights activist. Micaela Kaibni Raen is an award-winning published author and multimedia artist. Her craft is conceived in dimensional space where visual art and literature converge. Her work stitches eco-feminist poetics with Indigenous Palestinian textiles into print and digitized spaces to breakthrough a technomediated world.
Kaibni Raen is from the Little Arabia community in California and graduated from Chapman University. For over 40 years, she has advocated for Palestinians, Indigenous and displaced peoples, women, Queer/Trans youth in foster care, those affected by HIV/AIDS, and global Queer/Trans communities of color. She has participated in the Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc.; the National Organization for Women; ACT UP!; and Queer Nation.
She is most known as the creator of Queer Tatreez, a style of visual art and poetics inspired by Indigenous Palestinian embroidery. She has been awarded the Yalda Award for Poetry as well as nominations for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her work has been featured in Bint el Nas; Mizna; Qafiyah Review; Yellow Medicine Review; Noor; Rowayat; Koukash Review; The Poetry of Arab Women; El Ghourabaa; Ask the Night for a Dream: Palestinian Writing from the Diaspora; and Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry. With artwork showcased at Resistance at A.R.T./New York and featured by Protea Gallery, her work also appears in publication in The Olive Tree Collection, Chapter House Journal, and Baladi Magazine.
Socials
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/micaelakaibniraen
IG: @micaelakaibniraen
IG: @queertatreez
For a list of publications, please click on the Publications tab.