Book Discussion | Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, with Golden Globe and Tony Award Winner Tony Shalhoub (In Person AND Online)

On the centenary of Kahlil Gibran's best-selling work of mystical prose-poetry, actors and writers perform readings and discuss the elusive legacy of his most famous book.

Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, a proto-New Age collection of arcane and oracular poetic essays has sold over 100 million copies in its 100-year lifespan and has made Gibran the third best-selling poet after William Shakespeare and Laozi. Gibran, a writer and artist who lived and worked primarily in the downtown Manhattan neighborhood then known as Little Syria, has derived a mixed reputation from his mysterious volume of musings on subjects like love, law, beauty, and faith. He has been beloved by various counter-cultural and spiritual movements over the decades, but among scholars he is viewed alternatively as a "crucial modern innovator" or "horrifically retrograde." An evening of readings, lecture, and conversation will look into The Prophet and Gibran's reputation, as well as the history of Arab and Arab-American writers in New York.

About the Speakers
Hiba Abid is an art historian, codicologist of Arabic manuscripts, and is currently the Curator for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at The New York Public Library. Hiba taught courses on Islamic manuscripts and material culture at New York University's Department of Art History and Institute of Fine Arts. She has also worked as an Associate Researcher at the National Library of France, and curated exhibitions at the Louvre Museum, the Musee des Augustins, and Le 32bis: Center for Contemporary Art in Tunis. She studied Art history and archeology at the Sorbonne and received her PhD in Islamic Art history, codicology and philology from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris.

Randa Jarrar is the author of the memoir Love Is An Ex-Country, the novel A Map of Home, and the collection of stories Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. She is a filmmaker and actor who has appeared in independent films and on the A24 TV shows Ramy and #1 Happy Family USA. She is a recipient of a Creative Capital Award and an American Book Award, as well as awards and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, PEN, and others. She lives in Los Angeles.

Tony Shalhoub is a Tony Award Winner for The Band's Visit; in years prior to this, Tony has been nominated on five other occasions. Tony is perhaps best known for his work as the obsessive-compulsive detective Adrian Monk in the hit television series Monk, for which he won a Golden Globe Award, three Primetime Emmy Awards as well as two Screen Actors Guild Awards for his work. More recently, Tony is often known for his role as Abe Weissman in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. For his performance, he has won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series and two Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Comedy Series. Other notable TV credits include Antonio Scarpacci in Wings, Stark Raving Mad, and Nurse Jackie.