Nathalie Handal

Biography

Poet and writer, Nathalie Handal is a Visiting Associate Professor of Practice in Literature and Creative Writing at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her poetry draws on her experiences of dislocation, home, travel and exile.

She is the author of seven prize-winning collections, including Life in A Country Album, winner of the Palestine Book Award and the flash collection The Republics, winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the Arab American Book Award. Handal edited The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology (2000), which won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award. With Tina Chang and Ravi Shankar, she co-edited Language For a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (2008). She writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words without Borders magazine.

She is the recipient of awards from the PEN Foundation, Lannan Foundation, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, Fondazione di Venezia, among others.

Handal earned an MFA in poetry from Bennington College and an MPhil in drama and English from the University of London.

SAF participation:
March Meeting 2022