Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye was born in 1952 in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Palestinian father — the journalist Aziz Shihab — and an American mother. She spent part of her adolescence in Jerusalem, in the years just before 1967, and grew up between Ferguson, Missouri, and San Antonio, Texas, where she has lived most of her adult life.

Across more than thirty books of poetry, essays, and children’s literature, Nye has written about her Palestinian inheritance with tenderness and precision — poems like “Kindness,” and collections such as 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, written partly in response to the suspicion cast on Arab Americans after 11 September 2001. She has served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Selected works

• Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (1995)
• 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002)
• The Tiny Journalist (2019)
• Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems (2020)

Sources

• Naomi Shihab Nye — Poetry Foundation
• Naomi Shihab Nye — Academy of American Poets