Sara Qasem is a Palestinian poet, community advocate and educator living in Ōtautahi. Her work moves between memory and testimony, drawing on homeland, the inheritances of diaspora and the everyday acts of resistance that help her people endure. She writes toward the places where grief and resilience meet, believing that poetry can be both archive and lifeline- a way of holding what has been taken, and insisting on what still lives.
Publishing and performing across Aotearoa, Sara’s poems and essays centre the stories of her community, refusing erasure while reaching toward collective healing. She has shared her writing on many stages and has spoken on various platforms, held by the understanding that speaking as a Palestinian, Muslim woman is itself an act of defiance, love, and cultural survival.
Her set at Newtown Festival weaves together pieces of solidarity, memory, and resistance- an offering for those who continue to carry their homelands inside them: a call to witness, to stand with and to remember.
