My paper explores the challenge of syllabus building for a Palestinian literature course centering gender and queerness in a climate of anti-BDS laws, legislative moves against queer literature in many U.S. states, and federal U.S. legislative bodies equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Grounded in gender theory, women’s studies, reception theory, and postcolonial+decolonial thought, I ask, in the context of U.S. university student bodies receiving the course, how to optimize a Palestinian literature syllabus that explores gender fluidity while grounding students in histories of Nakba, Occupation, and genocide. How might text selection balance genre considerations, periodization, the Palestinian literary canon, and productions from the widespread geographies of Palestinian diaspora? This paper maps U.S.-positioned pedagogical strategy through an array of writing that treks from grand heteropatriarchal narratives to new gay stories, from The Time of White Horses to The Skin and Its Girl, but also widening genres from Palestinian folktale of Speak, Bird, Speak Again and the pre-modern gender-bending Epic of Dhat al-Himma (read as a Palestinian heroine) to Minor Detail and the speculative fiction of Nadia Afify and Ibtisam Azem. It explores the pedagogical potential of writerly “filial” pairings such as that of Adania Shibli to Samira Azzam (d. 1967) and Susan Abulhawa’s answer in the form of her novel, Mornings in Jenin, to Ghassan Kanafani’s questions raised in Returning to Haifa, as a means allowing U.S. students to understand the development of Palestinian literary conversations from elder generations to current cohorts.