Hala Hashem has a poem, Where is Syria? in What Meets the Eye? The Deaf Perspective.
Hala was born in Damascus, Syria, and came with her family to the UK at the age of five. From that time she gradually lost her hearing throughout her childhood and became profoundly deaf. She became proficient in lipspeaking and also learned British Sign Language (BSL). Hala has been working in the Civil Service for over 20 years at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as an Executive Officer in a variety of roles. Hala is passionate about the theatre arts and enjoys watching BSL and Captioned theatre shows especially musicals. She is a volunteer and member of Stagetext’s user panel, a charity which provides captioning and live subtitling services to theatres, museums and other arts venues. Hala is relatively new to poetry and writes when the mood or occasion appears. She has written a few personal poems which have been shared with family and friends. She has also written a couple poems for Stagetext in celebration of their 20th anniversary. Hala welcomes this exciting opportunity to be part of this Anthology of poetry and fiction amongst established D/deaf writers and poets.