Jointly organized and presented by Gaudy Boy and the Evergreen Review
Featuring Joy Amina Garnett, Dale Peck, and Arthur Fournier
Saturday, December 12, 2026, 6.30-8.00 PM
Flux IV (56-21 2nd St, Long Island City, NY 11101)
RSVP: Jee at jkoh@singaporeunbound.org
Please join Joy Amina Garnett in conversation with Dale Peck and Arthur Fournier to celebrate the New York launch of her long-awaited memoir, The Bee Kingdom, to be released by Gaudy Boy in January 2027. They will discuss the evolving manuscript vis-à-vis long years of archival research, and some of the dilemmas encountered when unearthing long-held secrets from family archives. Conversation and readings will be followed by a Q&A and book signing.
Praise
“TRUE, STRANGE, FAMILIAR, AND FANTASTICAL.”
— YOUSSEF RAKHA
“A VIBRANT MEDITATION ON ART AND IDENTITY.”
— DALE PECK
“BEGUILING… A TRIUMPHANT RECONSTRUCTION OF A FAMILY HISTORY.”
— ROBIN OSTLE
“INTIMATE AND EXPANSIVE… AN IMPORTANT CONTRIBUTION TO CONTEMPORARY LIFE WRITING.”
— SAMIA MEHREZ
About The Bee Kingdom:
A cross-generational memoir, an artist's coming-of-age, and a family detective story about the lost world of a prominent Egyptian family, The Bee Kingdom follows Joy Amina Garnett's lifelong search for her late maternal grandfather, Dr. Ahmed Zaky Abushady—polymath, beekeeper, and one of Egypt's most influential romantic poets. With the help of archival and academic papers, hidden diaries, and a compendium of family photographs, Garnett sheds light on a tumultuous period in Egypt's modern history, weaving together themes of unrequited love, exile, and resilience in her search for family and self.
In 2010, Garnett began the process of rescuing archival materials that had been accumulated by family members over the course of a century, and which revealed little-known facets of the life and work of her illustrious late grandfather. She soon enlisted the help of Arthur Fournier, who would eventually place the materials in the Special Collections of NYU Abu Dhabi Library in April 2020. Portions of the memoir were drawn from these materials.
Joy Amina Garnett is an Arab American writer and visual artist from New York, now living in Los Angeles. She spent her undergraduate years studying Arabic at McGill University and the American University in Cairo. Garnett began writing regularly for artnet magazine with the 1999 launch of her column, “Into Africa.” Since then, her essays have appeared in Harper’s, Arab Urbanism Magazine, Art21 Magazine, M/E/A/N/I/N/G, and in the chapters of several books. Her short stories have been published in Rusted Radishes, Evergreen Review, Ping-Pong, Nashville Review, ellipse, and elsewhere. In 2024, she became a fellow at Yaddo to work on The Bee Kingdom, an advance excerpt of which was Longlisted for the 2024 First Pages Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Garnett has served as the Art Director of the Evergreen Review since 2019. The Bee Kingdom is her first book.
Dale Peck is the author of fourteen books in a variety of genres. His short fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in more than fifty publications including the New York Times, Harper’s, and the Baffler. Peck is the Editor-in-Chief of the Evergreen Review and has been since its revival in 2017. Peck is a member of PEN and the National Book Critics Circle. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two O. Henry Awards, a Pushcart Prize, and the inaugural Lambda Literary Award for Young Adult fiction, and was named to the Out 100 list in 2010. Born on Long Island, Peck spent most of childhood in Kansas. He was educated at Drew University, and now lives in New York City with his husband, Lou Peralta, and their two cats.
Arthur Fournier is an independent broker specializing in twentieth-century archives and manuscripts. Over the past decade, he has placed significant collections in the arts, letters, and sciences with institutions including the Smithsonian, the Getty, Columbia University, Harvard, New York University, Penn State, Princeton, Yale, and the New York Public Library. His recent clients include the Malcolm McLaren estate, the Arthur Russell estate, The Wooster Group, Mudd Club co-founder Steve Mass, and Leonard Abrams, founder of the East Village Eye. A member of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA), Fournier also buys and sells rare books, serials, and ephemera across widely varying fields and genres.
