Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye (born March 12, 1952, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.) is a Palestinian American poet, children’s author, essayist, and educator whose work often revolves around her upbringing and experiences as an Arab American.

Naomi Shihab was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother in St. Louis, Missouri. She and her family moved to Jerusalem, her father’s home city, when she was 14 to care for her ailing paternal grandmother. Amid the tensions that would escalate into the Six-Day War of 1967, the family relocated to San Antonio, Texas, after only a year abroad. In 1974 she graduated from Trinity University in San Antonio with degrees in English and world religions. She subsequently married photographer Michael Nye.

Naomi Shihab Nye’s autobiographical young adult novel Habibi (1997), which won the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award in 1998, describes an Arab American family who moves to the West Bank and braves prejudice and violence to ultimately find connection and acceptance. In her critically acclaimed children’s novel The Turtle of Oman (2014), a young boy says farewell to the people and places of his home in Oman to prepare for a move to the United States. Nye also published the essay collection Never in a Hurry in 1996 and a collection of short stories for young adults titled There Is No Long Distance Now in 2011. Additionally, her fiction career includes picture books for young children such as Sitti’s Secrets (1994) and Baby Radar (2003).

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A Study of Poetry

Nye typically writes free-verse poetry that uses everyday life to explore cultural issues and the connections between diverse peoples. For her, she has said, “the primary source of poetry has always been local life, random characters met on the streets, our own ancestry sifting down to us through small essential daily tasks.” Her humanitarian efforts include several trips to the Middle East and Asia in support of the U.S. Information Agency’s Arts America program advocating for cultural understanding through the arts. She drew on her international travels for inspiration in examining the bridges between cultures. Speaking to Contemporary Authors, she mused, “poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.”

After producing two small collections of poetry in the late 1970s, she compiled a book-length collection titled Different Ways to Pray in 1980. Hugging the Jukebox (1982), Yellow Glove (1986), Fuel (1998), and Transfer (2011) are some of her other books of poetry. Nye’s 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002) and You and Yours (2005) were poetic responses to terrorism and Islamophobia during the aftermath of the attacks on September 11, 2001. The former was a finalist for a National Book Award, and the latter earned the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. Nye’s poetry collections specifically for children and adolescents include What Have You Lost? (1999), A Maze Me: Poems for Girls (2005), and Honeybee (2008).

Nye has spoken at many elementary schools and has led several writing workshops. She has taught at several universities, including the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Texas at San Antonio, and was a professor of creative writing at Texas State University. She served as the poetry editor for more than 20 years at the Texas Observer and in the same role for the New York Times Magazine from 2019 to 2020.

Nye has won numerous honours for her contributions to children’s and young adult literature, including the 2013 NSK Neustadt Award for Children’s Literature, as well as for her writings for adults, including multiple Pushcart Prizes and the 1998 Academy of American Poets’ Lavan Award. She served as an international ambassador of poetry on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets from 2010 to 2015. She became the 2019–22 Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate and was the guest editor for the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day program in April 2022. 

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