Laila El-Haddad is an award-winning writer, public speaker, and social activist. She is the co-editor of Gaza Unsilenced (2015) and the author of Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between (2010). Born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents from Gaza, she currently lives in Clarksville, Maryland with her husband and their three children. Maggie Schmitt is a writer, researcher, translator, educator, and social activist. She holds a B.A. from Harvard in Literature and has conducted advanced graduate studies in Social Anthropology and Mediterranean Studies at the Universidad Autnoma de Madrid. Schmitt works in various media-writing, production, photography, video-exploring the daily practices of ordinary people as a way of understanding political and social realities in the Mediterranean region.