Described as a “contemporary Orpheus” Nathalie Handal is a poet, playwright, nonfiction, and literary travel writer with ten award-winning books in her oeuvre. 

Her most recent collection is Roam Roma, include Volo;, Life in a Country Album—which was a winner of the Palestine Book Award and a Foreword Indies Book Award finalist; The Republics—winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the Arab American Book Award; the critically acclaimed Poet In Andalucía; and Love And Strange Horses—winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award which The New York Times writes is “a book that trembles with belonging (and longing).” Her most recent collection is Roam Roma.

Handal is the editor of the groundbreaking classic The Poetry Of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology which won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award and was named as one of the top ten feminist books by The Guardian. She is also the co-editor of the W.W. Norton landmark anthology Language For A New Century: Contemporary Poetry From The Middle East, Asia, And Beyond.

Handal is the recipient of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature, awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN Foundation, Lannan Foundation, Fondazione di Venezia, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, and The Africa Institute among others. She currently serves as the Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at NYU Abu Dhabi. She writes the literary travel column, “The City And The Writer” for Words without Borders.

Her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Guernica Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, The Irish Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, and on PBS and NPR, among others. Her recent plays have been produced at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Bush Theatre, and Westminster Abbey in London.

More from and about Nathalie Handal: “Accepting Heaven At Great Basin” (Poets.org) • “After Kaddish” (Guernica) • “Ahmad” (personal website) • “Cordite” (Poetry Review) • “Crucifixion: Nathalie Handal On Being Palestinian, Writing, And Love” (The Guardian) • “Haifa, My Longing” (Voyages) • “Haiti” (Guernica) • “Holy Cosmos” (Poets.org) • “Khamal Aljafari: Unfinished Balconies In The Sea” (Guernica) • “Love And Strange Horses—Intima” (Poetry Foundation) • “Midnight Train To Georgia” (LitHub) • “Musica Rota” (personal website) • “My East In Venice” (Guernica) • “Nathalie Handal Reading Poetry At The Pergamonmuseum Berlin” (US Embassy Berlin) • “The Act Of Counting” (Poetry Foundation) • “The Night And The Nightingale” (Guernica) • “The Unnatural Apologie Of Shadows” (Poetry Foundation) • “Unfound Reason: Six Flash Reportages” (Warscapes) • “While Waiting For Death” (Ratapallax)

Author image: Walled Shah