Naomi Shihab Nye

Photo: Tamam Kahn

Naomi Shihab Nye is an Arab-American poet living at a challenging time for uniting these two words—and worlds! She does this with elegance and bravery, and so inspires nearly everyone who hears or reads her. Naomi is the author of numerous books of poems, including You and Yours, which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, as well as 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, a collection of new and selected poems. She is author and/or editor of more than 25 volumes.

She has received the Carity Randall Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, and awards from the Texas Institute of Letters and the International Poetry Forum. She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. Her poems and short stories have appeared in various journals and reviews throughout North America, Europe, and the Middle and Far East. In January 2010 she was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. We are so very lucky that she gave permission to have us include her poetry in this issue of The Sound Journal.