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Portrait of Hala Alyan
Serine Ben Brahim, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons · Source file on Wikimedia Commons for “Portrait of Hala Alyan”

Hala Alyan

1986–

Carbondale, Illinois, USA

Poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist, Alyan maps the Palestinian diaspora in verse and prose alike — inheritance, exile, and the daily work of rebuilding a self.

Palestinian-Americandiasporapoetrynovelmemoir

Hala Alyan was born in 1986 in Carbondale, Illinois. Her family lived in Kuwait before seeking asylum in the United States after the Iraqi invasion of 1990, and she grew up between Oklahoma, Texas, Maine, and Lebanon, studying at the American University of Beirut, Columbia University, and Rutgers University, where she earned her doctorate in clinical psychology. She works as a clinical psychologist in New York, where she also teaches at New York University.

Alyan is the author of five poetry collections, from Atrium (2012) to The Moon That Turns You Back (2024). Her debut novel, Salt Houses (2017) — the story of a Palestinian family scattered by the Six-Day War and every upheaval since — won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award. She has also published the novel The Arsonists’ City (2021) and the memoir I’ll Tell You When I’m Home (2025), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Selected works

  • Hijra (poems, 2016)
  • Salt Houses (novel, 2017)
  • The Twenty-Ninth Year (poems, 2019)
  • The Arsonists’ City (novel, 2021)
  • The Moon That Turns You Back (poems, 2024)
  • I’ll Tell You When I’m Home (memoir, 2025)

Sources

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  1. SpoilerPoem
  2. Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud1913–1948
  3. Dareen Tatour1982–

Connected in the archive

11 connected records

11 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.

written by them — 1 record

  • SpoilerPoems

    Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: poetSlug: "hala-alyan" → Hala Alyan

named in this record — 2 records

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  • Salt HousesLibrary

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Her debut novel, Salt Houses (2017) — the story of a Palestinian family scattered by the Six-Day War and every upheaval since — won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award.

  • The Six-Day WarTimeline

    Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Her debut novel, Salt Houses (2017) — the story of a Palestinian family scattered by the Six-Day War and every upheaval since — won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award.

on a related subject — 8 records

Filed near each other — the same Mandate district, or the same uncommon subject tags.

Cite this page

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Chicago
“Hala Alyan.” Poetry, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/poetry/hala-alyan.
MLA
“Hala Alyan.” Poetry, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/poetry/hala-alyan. Accessed 22 August 2026.
BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-hala-alyan, title = {Hala Alyan}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/poetry/hala-alyan}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }