Fall Announcements

Fall is a busy time, school starts and big books you’ve been waiting to read for months finally get published. 

For myself, and by extension Waq al-waq this fall has been even busier than usual.  As many of you know, my first book – The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia – is set to be released in the US on November 12. 

There will be a handful of events associated with the release of the book both in New York and in DC, which I will try to keep you informed of here without overwhelming you with logistics and the like. 

And for those of you attending the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association in Denver this November there will also be a book reading at the Tattered Cover with Mark Bowden, who will be reading from his new book The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden (which I’m just reading now). I hope to meet some Waq al-waq readers at the event in Denver.

And if you are so inclined that afternoon, before the book talk, I will be on a panel at MESA discussing the 50th anniversary of Yemen’s 1962 Revolution and the civil war that followed, which is the topic of my dissertation, that I’m nearing completion on.  Also, on the panel is Jesse Ferris, a fine young Princeton Ph.D., who has his own book on the Yemeni Civil War coming out in January.

So Denver in November is shaping up to be a Yemen-heavy time – perfect for a pre-Thanksgiving treat.

Finally, I’m also nearing the end on a pair of articles – one on AQAP and another on the state of politics in Sanaa – which should be completed and published soon.  Both of these sprang out of my recent trip and rely heavily on interviews I completed in Yemen.