Suheir Hammad

Suheir Hammad was born in 1973 in Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian refugee parents from Lydda, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where her family immigrated when she was five. Raised on her grandparents’ stories of Palestine before 1948 and on Brooklyn’s hip-hop scene, she wove the two into a single narrative of dispossession — published first in Drops of This Story and Born Palestinian, Born Black (both 1996).

Her poem “First Writing Since,” written in the week after 11 September 2001, reached Russell Simmons, who signed her to HBO’s Def Poetry; she became an original writer and cast member of the Tony Award–winning Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway. Her collection breaking poems (2008), which channels hip-hop’s breaks and samples into elegies for Gaza, New Orleans, and other broken places, won the 2009 American Book Award. She also starred in Annemarie Jacir’s film Salt of This Sea (2008).

Selected works

• Born Palestinian, Born Black (1996)
• Drops of This Story (1996)
• ZaatarDiva (2006)
• breaking poems (2008)

Sources

• Suheir Hammad — Wikipedia
• “Poems of war, peace, women, power” — TEDWomen 2010
• “First Writing Since” — In Motion Magazine