Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian-American writer, editor, and educator. She has been Young People’s Poet Laureate for the U.S. (a project of the Poetry Foundation), poetry editor for the New York Times magazine and The Texas Observer, and a visiting writer in hundreds of schools and communities around the world. Her poetry collections, novels, edited volumes, and children’s literature include Everything Comes Next (2020), The Tiny Journalist (2019), Voices in the Air (2018), Tender Spot: Selected Poems (2008), Habibi (1997), and This Same Sky (1992). Her edited volume 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002) was a finalist for the National Book Award, while The Turtle of Oman (2009) and The Turtle of Michigan (2022) have both been part of the Little Read program in North Carolina. Nye has received Lifetime Achievement Awards from The Texas Institute of Letters, the Arab American National Museum, and the National Book Critics Circle. She grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she continues to live.