[between two worlds]
A WANDERING POET TELLING PALESTINE’S HIDDEN STORIES N A O M I
S H I H A B
N Y E
Award-winning Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother in St. Louis in 1952. Just four years earlier, her father and his family lost their home in Jerusalem following the establishment of the state of Israel. As Nye explains, “When you grow up in a house with someone who lives with a very strong sense of exile, when they are disconnected from the place they love most, that casts a certain light on how you see everything—your sense of gravity, history and justice.” In 1966, Nye’s family moved to Jerusalem but left following the outbreak of the 1967 war. They relocated to San Antonio, Texas, where she resides today. Nye explains, “I think as a Palestinian American that’s part of my job—to tell the stories that the news does not take the time to tell. We have to tell what we know.” Nye has traveled to Palestine frequently and has given readings at all major Palestinian universities. “I feel an urgency that Arab-American writers find a way where we can be more useful.” Naomi Shihab Nye describes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent forty years traveling the country and the world to lead writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages. Drawing on her Palestinian-American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her
experiences traveling in Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America and the Middle East, Nye uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity. Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than thirty volumes. Her book of poetry 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her collection of poems for young adults entitled Honeybee won the 2008 Arab American Book Award in the Children’s/Young Adult category. A new novel for children, The Turtle of Oman, was published in August 2014. Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, and numerous honors for her children’s literature, including two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards. In 2011 Nye won the Golden Rose Award given by the New England Poetry Club, the oldest poetry reading series in the country. In January 2010 Nye was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.
13
