Interview: Moudi Sbeity
SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER INTERVIEWS POET LEVI ROMERO FOR SOUTH BROADWAY PRESS
The following Q&A presents Shelli Rottschafer’s interview with Moudi Sbeity for the South Broadway Press community about his collection. Rottschafer and Sbeity have read selections of their poetry in the past with the Cannon Mines Poetry group in Lafayette, Colorado.
On Tuesday February 16, 2027 they will read with Colorado Poets Center at the Boulder Bookstore at 6:30pm. Rottschafer will read from her collection Sorrel Summer Sky (2027) and Sbeity will read from Alhamdulillah Anyway (2026).
Moudi Sbeity (Muhamad Darwich Sbeity) is a Lebanese-American poet, author, and contemplative educator. Born in Texas and raised in Lebanon, he moved to the United States at the age of eighteen as an evacuee following the 2006 July war. In Utah, Moudi founded and operated Laziz Kitchen, a Lebanese restaurant celebrated by the New York Times as “the future of queer dining.” Moudi was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah and the 10th circuit states in 2014. A lifelong stutterer, he is passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression.
SLR: Moudi, thank you for this interview. You are well acquainted with South Broadway Press as you have published individual poems with them before, you have read alongside many of their poets, and you are active within the extended Denver and Boulder creative communities.
In your debut collection, Alhamdulillah Anyway (2026) you write of community often.
Can you tell us more about the importance of both a creative community and a heart-space community?
MS: Community is imperative to our survival. After all, it is through relationships that we come to discover who we are, whether to another person, to mystery, to the land and other life forms, or to our inner selves. Just as we were not born alone, we cannot truly survive alone. Growing up in the communal and collectivist culture of Lebanon taught me the necessity of turning toward each other. Who, or what, else do we have to turn to? Where else do we go? This is at the heart of the two poems “The Universe is Lonely” and “So I can think of nothing more necessary.” If all we have and know to be true and alive is our place on this planet in the cosmos, then we have a duty to companion each other through the fate of existing. Otherwise, we may not be able to bear our condition in the world. I say all this with a caveat that, as writers and poets especially, we also need time in solitude and retreat.
SLR: In poems like, “A Life’s Worth” your verse acts as poetry-of-witness.
What do you want the South Broadway Press readership to know about what is happening in Lebanon, Palestine, and the Middle East in general?
MS: Poetry, in its exalted and deepest form, is an act of witness. A poem points to the veracity of what is, along with its many tragedies and wonders, without ever definitively pinning down what’s there. From this perspective, poems are testimonies of what we see and experience. What’s happening in Lebanon and Palestine specifically (and in many other areas of our one world) is nothing short of heartbreaking. Violence and aggression by men in power abound, and many suffer because of their insolence. While we do not have the power to change political tactics and systemic economic incentives, we can, and must, not look away from the large scale genocide in Gaza, and the war aggression in Lebanon funded by the United States through their proxy power, Israel. We have a role to play here as poets, as witnesses responding with a clear language that speaks toward the protection and celebration of life.
SLR: Moudi, in many of your poems you address self-censorship and freedom of expression.
How is silence a form of complicity? How can writing be a form of resistance?
MS: Freedom of expression for me speaks to more than just breaking silence and resisting tyranny by way of the pen, but more so to a childhood condition of stuttering, a condition that persists today, though covertly. Difficulty with speech and fluency meant that I censored myself often, and struggled to express my thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Writing allowed me to discover and practice my voice on the page, and then gave me the confidence to speak more openly. In the personal sense here, my own silence was a form of complicity in an environment that rewarded one expression of fluency. Writing was the resistance. Expanding out the lens, silence in the face of violence and oppression, though born out of fear and preservation, is an act of being complicit in our smallness. We then allow systems of power to persist. By writing in resistance to conditions that are harmful, we have the power to encourage change in others, to seed new ideas and perspectives, to empower people in their own voice. At the very least, we leave records for our future kin to study.
SLR: In poems like “What Remains” and “Water Remembers where it has been” you intertwine an environmental justice thread.
Can you talk a bit about your relationship with our natural world and why you feel that is important?
MS: I read a post online, shared from an account named Enron Hubbard, that read “Someone once asked me why I was worried about the environment. I just said ‘I live there’, and they looked at me as if that fact has never once occurred to them.” This gets right to the heart of it. Do we want to continue living? And still, do we want to live in relative dignity and ease? We have this Earth that exists in an intricate balance conducive to the living. It’s in our best interest to ensure that this balance remains. How we treat the earth and the environment we are in is a reflection of how we feel about and treat ourselves. To love who I am is to also love the world that made me. The degree of my self-hatred and self-violence is mirrored in my aggression against the earth. And so, one way to heal ourselves is to heal the environment we are interwoven to.
SLR: In “Give Us This Day” you mention how prayer and ceremony can be in the small acts we do each day.
If you had a mantra, what would it be?
MS: I repeat the Islamic / Sufi mantra la illaha illa allah and bismillah al rahman al rahim everyday, almost by the minute. La illaha illa allah translates to there is no God/Love/Reality, but the one God/Love/Reality. Bismillah al rahman al rahim translates to we begin in the name of Allah/Love/Reality, who is mercy and compassion. They serve as reminders that we are not separate, and that everything we say and do has its origins in one source, born from mercy and compassion. If we can remember this everyday, we can then enter every moment and encounter everyone and everything as sacred. Then all acts, small and large and otherwise, are acts of prayer and ceremony tuned towards compassion, forgiveness, and love.
SLR: Since many of those within the South Broadway Press community are writers themselves,
do you have a mini prompt or advice to give to help carry on one’s “writer’s life”?
MS: I think of Mary Oliver’s advice: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” There is much in the world around us to inspire reflection, witness, and testimony. A breeze could be a prompt, as could a mewling kitten. It doesn’t matter if what we write makes sense, or is up to grammatical standards, at least not in the beginning. What matters is that we put pen to paper and let inspiration express itself. So long as we are in contemplative awareness of the world within and without, we’ll most likely find something worth writing about.
SLR: Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts Moudi with the South Broadway Press community.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER:
Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).
Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue.
Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com
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