Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Poet, essayist, and translator whose "Running Orders" carried Gaza's summer of 2014 around the world — and whose later collections made her one of the most honored Palestinian poets writing in English.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a Palestinian American poet, essayist, and translator. In July 2014, as Israel’s assault on Gaza unfolded, she wrote “Running Orders” — a poem spoken by a Gazan mother who receives the Israeli military’s phone call warning that her home is next. The poem spread across the world within days, was translated into several languages, and was later collected in her debut book, Water & Salt (2017), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award.
Her subsequent collections are Kaan and Her Sisters (2023) and Something About Living (2024), which won the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry. A translator of Arabic poetry as well as a poet, she studied comparative literature at the University of Washington and earned her MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She lives in Redmond, Washington.
Selected works
- Water & Salt (2017)
- Kaan and Her Sisters (2023)
- Something About Living (2024)
Sources
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Explore Lena Khalaf TuffahaConnected in the archive
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written by them — 1 record
- Running Orders
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: poetSlug: "lena-khalaf-tuffaha" → Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
on a related subject — 8 records
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- George Abraham
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Shared tags: "Palestinian-American", "diaspora", "poetry".
- Hala Alyan
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Shared tags: "Palestinian-American", "diaspora", "poetry".
- Naomi Shihab Nye
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Shared tags: "Palestinian-American", "diaspora", "poetry".
- Suheir Hammadسهير حماد
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Shared tags: "Palestinian-American", "diaspora".
- A Mountainous Journey: A Poet's Autobiography
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "poetry".
- Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "diaspora".
- and 2 more
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“Lena Khalaf Tuffaha.” Poetry, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/poetry/lena-khalaf-tuffaha.- MLA
“Lena Khalaf Tuffaha.” Poetry, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/poetry/lena-khalaf-tuffaha. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-lena-khalaf-tuffaha, title = {Lena Khalaf Tuffaha}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/poetry/lena-khalaf-tuffaha}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }