SATA

• I Know about a Thousand Things: The Writings of Ann Alejandro of Uvalde, Texas Texas A&M University Press (College Station, TX), 2024
• Grace Notes: Poems about Families Greenwillow Books (New York, NY), 2024

1. Grace notes : poems about families LCCN 2024004873 Type of material Book Personal name Nye, Naomi Shihab, author. Main title Grace notes : poems about families / Naomi Shihab Nye. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Greenwillow Books, 2024. Projected pub date 2405 Description 1 online resource ISBN 9780062691897 (ebook) (hardcover) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. Awakening the heart : teaching poetry, K-8 LCCN 2023050689 Type of material Book Personal name Heard, Georgia, author. Main title Awakening the heart : teaching poetry, K-8 / Georgia Heard ; foreword by Naomi Shihab Nye. Edition Second edition. Published/Produced Portsmouth, NH : Heinemann, [2024] Description xxii, 224 pages : color illustrations ; 26 cm ISBN 9780325171326 (paperback : acid-free paper) CALL NUMBER LB1575.5.U5 H43 2024 FT MEADE Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. I know about a thousand things : the writings of Ann Alejandro of Uvalde, Texas LCCN 2024030936 Type of material Book Personal name Alejandro, Ann, 1955-2019, author. Main title I know about a thousand things : the writings of Ann Alejandro of Uvalde, Texas / edited by Naomi Shihab Nye and Marion Winik. Edition First edition. Published/Produced College Station : Texas A&M University Press, [2024] Projected pub date 2409 Description 1 online resource ISBN 9781648432415 (ebook) (cloth) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 4. Braided Creek : a conversation in poetry LCCN 2022046798 Type of material Book Personal name Kooser, Ted, author. Main title Braided Creek : a conversation in poetry / Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison ; foreword by Naomi Shihab Nye ; afterword by Ted Kooser. Edition Expanded Anniversary Edition. Published/Produced Port Townsend, Washington : Copper Canyon Press, 2023. Projected pub date 2312 Description 1 online resource ISBN 9781619322882 (epub) (hardcover) Item not available at the Library. Why not?

• Texas Observer - https://www.texasobserver.org/naomi-shihab-nye-public-poetry/

  Deep in the Hearts of Children: 50 Years of Public Poetry
  Our outgoing Poetry Editor reflects on decades of artistic expression and education in the Lone Star State.

  by Naomi Shihab Nye

  June 14, 2023, 3:07 PM, CDT

  Naomi Shihab Nye has her brown hair in a pony tail hanging over her right shoulder. She's wearing a black collared button-down shirt and standing outdoors in a garden environment.
  A version of this story ran in the May / June 2023 issue.

  Editor’s Note Naomi Shihab Nye was Poetry Editor at the Texas Observer for the past 28 years.

  A sixth-grader wearing a yellow floral dress waved me down, then sidled up to my car window in Albany, Texas. I was pulling out of her school parking lot for the last time.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said. “I always knew there had to be another poemist out there somewhere.”

  In 1974, my fiction writing professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, Robert Flynn, had casually mentioned a fledgling program being sponsored by the Texas Commission on the Arts (TCA). Called Artists in Education or Artists in the Schools, this program sent practicing artists in various disciplines into classrooms around the state (and many other states, such as New York, California, and Hawai’i) for short residencies, to encourage kids of all ages. I was about to graduate and had few plans for the future aside from paying back my college loan and writing.

  Like a true professional, I traveled to Austin for my interview without a CV or single sample of my poetry. My dad drove me. I had lots of enthusiasm, though, and got the job on the spot. Into the schools of Texas!

  “I always knew there had to be another poemist out there somewhere.”

  Did I have any experience? Working for a summer journalism institute, literary magazine division, with high school writers at Trinity was all. Had I taken any education courses? Not one. Zen Buddhism, handmade pottery, Sufism, art history, hymnology—perfect preparation. Did I have any books out? Of course not. I was 22. We’d made construction paper poetry booklets when I was in second grade, back in the unheard-of province of Ferguson, Missouri. But I’d been sending my poems to magazines since I was 7 and believed anyone could do it. Certainly a little more poetry could help us all better live our lives.

  I said I’d like to do it for two years.

  My only local mentor, Rosemary Catacalos of San Antonio, had been working in schools for a few years already. “Check in with her,” the TCA people suggested. She had never been to college, had worked as a journalist, and would go on to become a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellow, the poet laureate of Texas, and my dear friend for 51 years. Rosemary said things like “Just give kids space. Read aloud. Use great examples.” Some Nova Scotians I met on a rainy street in Halifax handed me a Kenneth Koch book, Wishes, Lies, and Dreams, about working with poetry in schools, in which Koch said teaching was not really what took place. “It’s more like letting the children discover something they already have.”

  The words just jumped into the quiet. The words blasted into the dark. —Seth Hansford

  Driving the back roads of Texas in my old 1965 Mercedes Benz with an open sunroof, a full library of thin poetry books in wooden crates in my back seat, and Townes Van Zandt cassette tapes, the state opened up in front of me. Before computers, email, social media, Google Maps, we visiting artists found all the places we needed to go. For years and years, I would find that poetry lived everywhere—Longview, Del Rio, Abilene, Amarillo. Voices, voices, voices. Corpus Christi kids blew my mind, they were so eloquent. I wondered if it had something to do with living next to that silvery, glittering water. In fact, all the kids were eloquent. Not once did I stumble upon any far-flung Texas community where poetry didn’t already live.

  State arts commissions used a matching-funds system to pay for artist residencies—schools paid the other half. The hope was, if a school wished to invite more artists, or wanted a return visit, they would pick up the full bill themselves—this often happened. In those days, artists in the schools were paid no per diem, so some of us chose to stay with hospitable families, so as not to spend too much of our income on motels. I once made a public request for a six-week lodging in Temple, having had no invitations, and a kind woman from Zenith Street stood up in the back row and said I was welcome to her extra bedroom. New friends and relatives appeared everywhere—in Albany, Kingsville, and on a Comstock ranch where, for the first and last time in my life, I would ride a horse to work.

  Texas Observer Poetry Editor Naomi Nye at the Poetry Out Loud competition in the Bullock Texas State History Museum (Sergio Flores for The Texas Observer)
  Classroom methods felt so simple—exposure and enthusiasm about writing and poetry were more important than expertise. I did not teach lists of poetry definitions. I did not encourage rhyme or dreaded cinquain or limerick forms. Essentially, I did not teach forms. Forever a proponent of “free verse” or “open form” poetry, I banked on descriptions of topics, discussions of sample poems (always three, so young writers wouldn’t parallel the samples too closely), writing and sharing times. This was long before the TCA would promote the marvelous Poetry Out Loud national competition in memorization and recitation of other people’s poems, continuing today. I worked in public schools, private and parochial schools, large, small, and in-between. I’d often request the “at-risk” students if a school asked me to focus on the “gifted and talented.” Only once did I ever feel scared—when some cowboys trailed me from a Comanche diner to my motel parking lot. I started driving in circles, then drove back downtown for a while, so they couldn’t see what room I entered. Later I pushed the ragged chair in my room up against the door.

  We had poetry programs, hallway exhibitions of illustrated poetry, to which parents were invited, handmade anthologies (I would stay up late at night, typing the poems for school print shops), songs written by kids that became part of a marvelous cassette tape project, distributed throughout the San Antonio ISD, and plenty of joy and laughter. A Westside San Antonio principal integrated lines of poetry into every morning’s intercom announcement. Years later when librarians would ask me, “What did you do when kids made fun of one another’s work?” I could honestly say, “To my knowledge, they never did.” One time a teacher made fun of a boy who’d written about his brain, by saying, “I didn’t even realize you had one,” but the students were always respectful in my presence.

  I believe my grandmother lives/beyond death, in my mirror.—Brenda L. Burmeister

  I don’t recall any fraught conversations or troubles around religion, politics, transgender students, abortions, guns, banned books, etc. Were we smarter then? When the wars in Iraq (to which I was adamantly opposed) kicked off, I recall asking myself what poetry could do. Maybe sharing poems by regular people of Iraq, moms and dads with worries and troubles of their own, might help Texas students think of the human beings everywhere who suffer and dream. Teachers at Hockaday School in Dallas urged me to make an international anthology, including such voices. And my life as an anthologist began.

  Of course, when one does the same job for a long time, testimonials materialize. Teachers would report things like, “Johnny started turning in his math homework after that poetry workshop. What does poetry have to do with math?” A San Antonio eighth-grader with an F average in English won the national Scholastic Writing contest in poetry. A girl chased me down in an H-E-B to say, “Just wanted you to know that keeping that observation notebook ended up saving my life.” Another girl I met randomly on a street said keeping a notebook had helped her realize what her life path should be. A mom began weeping one day when she saw me in line behind her at CVS. “Why is it,” she said, “that only once in my life was I invited to share my real voice?”

  For any of us who thought poetry mattered in the big picture in the beginning, we only came to think it mattered a lot more than we might have dreamed.

  When I was born, it was like a big ocean with one fish. / Then it was like I was not the only one in the ocean. /And when I was bigger, it was like an elephant in a jar.—Homer Soto

  I never wanted to “turn people into poets.” I just wanted them to realize how rich their own experience was, how much material they had, to know that writing was their friend, and if they felt comfortable writing things down, their lives would be easier, whatever path they chose. To meet a librarian in George West who sponsored the “Find Your Book” project for seniors, so when they walked across the stage to collect their diplomas, “their” book would be mentioned as their favorite—a kind of handle on identity—was a revelation. Having lunch with students who were having trouble “finding their book,” I suggested local writers—J. Frank Dobie perhaps?—writers from Mexico, cross-cultural writers, and POETRY! Some of them had not even considered poetry.

  Years rolled by and unfortunately testing became a lot more important. The rising stress level in classroom curriculums felt palpable. Not one teacher I ever met suggested affection for the standardized testing obsession. It felt as if teachers had lost some of their personal creative agency along the way—the ability to manage their own academic time clocks and expectations for students. I kept remembering the brilliant Texas journalist Bill Moyers saying he had fallen in love with poetry because his high school English teacher in Marshall always read his class a poem right after lunch. It wasn’t for an assignment or a future test, it was simply for pleasure. What happened to pleasure?

  “Not one person ever said that writing poetry hurt them.”

  Not one person ever said that writing poetry hurt them. It didn’t take that long to write a rough draft of a poem, after all. You could sneak it into a day.

  One summer in San Antonio, I accepted a volunteer assignment to visit a community center where kids experiencing trouble with reading and writing were taking a mandatory course. The maintenance director met me outside. “Sorry to say, our air conditioning’s out.” Oh well, Bill Moyers hadn’t gone to high school with air conditioning. Inside the steamy room of middle-school participants, a hip-hoppy guy waved his hand. “Do you think it’s possible to fall in love with a single word?”

  Uh, yes I do. Realizing how this might go wrong, I nodded and said, “Do you have such a word?”

  He took a breath. “Yes, I do! LYRICAL.” And another great day with language began.

  My voice can be a swan/and speak with its wings/but behind it is a shadow/that looks like the world.—Vangie Castillo

  Forever I will be grateful to the Texas Commission on the Arts for taking chances on so many of us, for believing in classrooms, kids, and teachers, artists and writers. I will be grateful to the hundreds of Texas schools that accepted and welcomed us. I went on to work all over the world, but Texas schools stayed deep in the center of my heart. Bolstered by TCA’s idealism and vast Texas-sized community spirit, the wandering artists turned in handwritten reports about every residency, containing samples of work, mailing them in large brown envelopes to Austin. I always drew stars next to the address.

  Editor’s Note: The bold-text lines of poetry quoted above were written by the students Naomi Shihab Nye met in the TCA visiting artists program.

• Texas Observer - https://www.texasobserver.org/palestinian-american-poet-naomi-shihab-nye-gaza-palestine/

  Naomi Shihab Nye: Life As a Palestinian-American Poet
  "Palestinians are all haunted. We’re haunted by what used to be, what could have been."

  by Francesca D’Annunzio

  January 12, 2024, 2:32 PM, CST

  Naomi Shihab Nye is the Texas Observer’s poetry editor emeritus. She is Palestinian-American and grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and San Antonio. She frequently visited family in Palestine throughout her lifetime, including as a child. Amid Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza, the Observer asked her about how growing up Palestinian influenced her writing.

  What attracted you to poetry?

  That was a lifetime, instinctive connection.

  I loved the ways poetry worked on the page and in our brains. I loved the spaciousness about poetry—the space around the lines and room for your own thinking. I love the variety of voices.

  By the time I was in second grade, I already felt like poetry was my land. I was writing my own poems from the age of six, and when I was seven, I started sending them to children’s magazines. It was a world that I entered into out of pleasure. It helped me think, and it gave me space to be in that felt meaningful.

  There’s a rich history and legacy of Palestinian poets like the late Mahmoud Darwish and Mosab Abu Taha from Gaza. Are there any Palestinian poets who inspire your work?

  My father would read [the works of poet Mahmoud] Darwish to me when I was a child and translate it because, in those days, there were not many translations of him. My father would read other poetry and translate it for me, and I just loved it. I loved everything about it: the metaphors, the passion, the care, the tenderness, the flowing quality of the lines. I eventually met Darwish, and he would ask me to read his poems in English; he didn’t like to read his poems in English at all. He read in Arabic, and just getting to be with him was such a landmark in my lifetime’s experience.

  “I had a chance to be with just so many people who are now not available to us in the flesh, only through their words. I felt them as a wellspring of the spirit of Palestine, and the love and the care for Palestine.”

  I had a chance to be with [Palestinian poets] Fadwa Tuqan or Samih al-Qasim, Taha Muhammad Ali, whom I adored—or just so many people who are now not available to us in the flesh, only through their words.

  I felt them as a wellspring of the spirit of Palestine, and the love and the care for Palestine—that is something that the media often finds easy to overlook. It’s just so insulting—versus the poetry which is so respectful, passionate, loving, and nostalgic.

  One of your 2014 poems, “Before I Was A Gazan,” reads like it was written this year. What’s the backstory?

  It’s not a new poem. It’s 10 years old. At that time, there were some literacy programs out of Gaza that were inviting me and some other writers I know to be with the children, be with the students, and talk about writing and story, and why we need story, and why we need to believe in our own voices. Shortly after one of my sessions with these beautiful, beautiful kids who never ever complained about anything, there was a horrible, genocidal bombing of Gaza. … I just kept picturing these kids and thinking about their names, and what had happened to them, how many were still living, were any still living, were any of them killed, and I kept trying to get through to their teacher and find out if they were. That poem was from a horrible sleepless night.

  They were just human beings. They were kids; they were proud—just like the boy in the poem is proud of his math homework. I was just thinking how horrific it is that children have to suffer these disasters, and I felt like I needed to write something in their honor. That’s how that poem came to be—but the weird part about that poem is, it’s not obsolete; it’s continued to be relevant all these years.

  As poets, our minds reel and give us images. I just kept thinking, What would it be like to be a child who goes off to school or loses your homework, or something so pedestrian? And then your whole house disappears before you can even get home.

  Before I Was A Gazan by Naomi Shihab Nye

  I was a boy
  and my homework was missing,
  paper with numbers on it,
  stacked and lined,
  I was looking for my piece of paper,
  proud of this plus that, then multiplied,
  not remembering if I had left it
  on the table after showing to my uncle
  or the shelf after combing my hair
  but it was still somewhere
  and I was going to find it and turn it in,
  make my teacher happy,
  make her say my name to the whole class,
  before everything got subtracted
  in a minute
  even my uncle
  even my teacher
  even the best math student and his baby sister
  who couldn’t talk yet.
  And now I would do anything
  for a problem I could solve.

  Earlier, you called going to Palestine a “deep experience,” and I noticed in some of your poems, there are these classical symbols and themes about Palestine, like olive trees and figs. How does being Palestinian-American influence your writing?

  Oh, that’s so beautiful. It’s just everywhere—it’s my texture; it’s my material; it’s my body of knowledge; it’s my dream field.

  I think we all pull from the world right around us. Palestine, for me, was like the soul place. My father never wanted to stay gone from it long. He always dreamed of going back. He wanted to be on his own land. He wanted to treasure and be in that community that he loved so much. He wanted to die there.

  For me, as a writer, just to have this fabric, this gorgeous fabric like the Palestinian tatreez [traditional Palestinian embroidery], the stitchery, the tiny threads of color traveling through my whole life has been the most important thing to me.

  Palestine has been for so many people an unresolved dream of gravity and beauty. It’s people from Brooklyn who currently have my father’s old home in Jerusalem or did the last time I was there. There’s that sense of unresolvedness when people are haunted by something that’s not right.

  Palestinians are all haunted. We’re haunted by what used to be, what could have been, what we dream could be, what we would prefer for all the people who are living there right in the heart of it—and have everything at stake. Everything.

  This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

• Poetry Northwest - https://www.poetrynw.org/interview-the-voices-we-carry-a-conversation-with-naomi-shihab-nye/

  Published on September 1, 2023
  Interview // “The Voices We Carry”: A Conversation with Naomi Shihab Nye
  by Montserrat Andrée Carty | Contributing Writer

  Like many people, I first discovered Naomi Shihab Nye through her poem “Kindness.” From there I fell in love with her words, and with her approach, as an artist, to the world. The way her warmth comes through on the page in a humble use of language, how she sees the ordinary as extraordinary, and the attention she gives to all beings, especially young people. The qualities that would make her the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate. Naomi herself has a youthful spirit, an openness that we often only find in the wisdom of children, but coupled with a deeper understanding of that wisdom—the kind that comes from life experience. She also inspires in the way she amplifies the voices of other writers and artists that have touched her. In Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (published in 2018 by Greenwillow Books), she gorgeously pays tribute to many of the voices she carries, people she feels are kindred—some she has known personally, some she has not—but who all opened something in her and in turn, in us, when we read these poems. Among those voices are Lucille Clifton, John O’Donohue, Maya Angelou, and her beloved father Aziz Shihab. Nye’s father was a Palestinian refugee and her mother an American of German and Swiss descent. She grew up in both Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas. This cultural mix colors much of her work, in the most beautiful ways, dripping with love and curiosity. It is with the most tender heart that she writes about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In her poem “Blood” she writes: “I call my father, we talk around the news. / It is too much for him, / neither of his two languages can reach it.” It is this too muchness, the pain that language struggles to reach that Nye somehow manages to for us, with her own poems. In that same poem, she writes: “Today the headlines clot in my blood.” Nye is able to bring us beyond the headlines, beyond a country or city, into a house. Into a room, into a human heart—by zooming way in. By going granular, she takes us into the humanity of the people behind the headlines, and the lesson we so often come to after reading her generous poems: that we are all more alike than we might think. Her work is a call to compassion. At the ending of her poem, “Janna,” in her collection The Tiny Journalist (a 2019 collection inspired by “the Youngest Journalist in Palestine,” then-seven-year-old Janna Jihad Ayyad), Nye writes:

  Why can’t they see
  how beautiful we are?

  The saddest part?
  We all could have had
  twice as many friends.

  For me, her description of what it is to live between cultures—“I’m not a full Arab, I’m not a full American. I always felt like I was a little bit on the sidelines”—resonates deeply. I live on the sidelines of my own cultures. Being made up of many places, people, and cultural experiences is what makes us feel on the sidelines, but is also precisely the fertile ground that sprouts deep listening to and astute observation of the world around us.

  When it came to the chance to speak with Nye, I knew the cliché advice to not meet your heroes was one I would not heed. I had a hunch that we would connect—though I couldn’t have imagined that she’d become such an important person in my life. The beginning of our friendship was sparked by this very interview.

  We don’t have to physically be with somebody to have that connection and kinship. During our first conversation over Zoom, Nye told me how she felt that connection with the late poet John O’Donohue as I now feel it with her, despite not yet having been in the same room together until recently. Nye is the embodiment of kindness—there have been days I’ve felt gloomy in spirit and that same day a surprise package will arrive from her. Dried beans, beeswax chapstick, blue corn flour pancake mix, and my day is turned around. Or a book of poetry from a poet I didn’t yet know, with a handwritten card. Perhaps the kindest of things she gifts, though, is a generosity of spirit.

  She once told me I must get William Stafford’s books—Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer’s Vocation or You Must Revise Your Life. Just as William Stafford’s voice is one Nye carries, I now carry her voice with me in many ways. In her I’ve found a kindred spirit, who understands me, but knows a little better than me, too. To share her wisdom with me is one of the greatest kindnesses I have known.

  Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian-American poet, the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate, and previous editor of poems for the New York Times Sunday magazine. She has written or edited more than thirty books, including Cast Away, The Tiny Journalist, Voices in the Air, and Everything Comes Next. We began our conversation over Zoom, talking about our shared wandering spirit. This conversation first appeared on Musings of the Artist in an audio format. It has been transcribed here for Poetry Northwest.

  I heard her say once that she has always felt like a wanderer, which resonated deeply, having not had one place to call home. And so, I ask her a question I am still trying to answer myself:

  Montserrat Andrée Carty (MAC): How did you find your sense of home in the world?

  Naomi Shihab Nye (NSN): Well, my parents, they were open to wandering. We would go on these family driving trips to different places. We did that when I was a child, and then we wandered in Europe and in the Middle East, and lived in the Middle East, and came back. When I got out of college, my family came to Texas. I took a job at the Texas Commission on the Arts. I said, “Yes, I can work for you and I’ll go from town to town, and be a visiting poet.” It was a fantastic life, a fantastic job. I loved every second of it, and I did it basically my entire adult life, in different ways. It was a great way to be out there in the world, going to these towns and being presented to large groups of kids in various environments. Then seeing, how could I make this thing that mattered so much to me, poetry, your own voice, spoken word, written word, be a positive experience for other kids? How could there be enthusiasm around that experience for everybody? For years I remember this girl, she might’ve been a 6th grader, when I was out in a small town called Albany, Texas. The first time I ever worked there, I was leaving town, after two weeks at the school and this girl chased my car—I saw her in the rearview mirror, waving. I opened the window and she said to me, “I just wanted to tell you that I had waited for you all my life. I always knew there had to be another poemist out there somewhere.” I thought, here was a child who really loved poetry and writing and she even had invented her own word, poemist. It was so charming. Just hearing that little child’s voice, I always knew there had to be another one out there somewhere. That’s happened every single place I’ve ever worked, whether in remote, rural Alaska, or an orphanage in Jordan. The sense of deep connection with kids keeps you going.

  MAC: You have written about a pivotal moment in your childhood, when you wrote a poem that a girl who was older than you read and she said, “I know what you mean.” Isn’t so much of the reason that we create art and devour art so that we don’t feel alone and we can say to each other, “Me too, I know what you mean?” I’m moved by the fact that you found that realization early on, that it really sparked your own vocation and love for words and poetry.

  NSN: Well, that’s so nice of you to notice that and to think about it. I do think that you can’t really get any better than that, someone saying to you, they know what you mean. I was in first grade and first grade was not going very well for me. I had had a few bad little episodes. I had done something on the first day I didn’t mean to do: contributed to someone breaking their nose, which was not a great thing on the first day of school. I was pinned by my teacher as a troublemaker, because I had poked someone with a pencil. I had a bad reputation and the teacher was not gracious to me. As far as I could tell school was going to be a long and durable experience and then my parents told me we were going off to Chicago for the weekend, on a train. I was just in my first few weeks of feeling that I could write, because we were just starting to write in first grade. I wanted to write a poem in the hotel room in Chicago to describe how astonishing and exhilarating the day had been. I wrote that poem and then I carried it back to first grade, gave it to my teacher. I remember thinking, even though I didn’t know this term yet, it’s like a peace offering. Maybe she’ll like me now, if I give her something. She read it distractedly and said, “Oh, that’s nice. You can hang it up in the hallway.” A few weeks later, this older girl whom I imagined as a third grader ran over to me and said, “Are you the person who wrote that poem about Chicago?” I said, “Yes.” She said, “I read it. I went there too. I know what you mean.” Here I was, a six-year-old, feeling a little bit lost. Suddenly, this older child just stared me in the eyes and said, I know what you mean. She ran off to the playground and lucky for me, I was a person who could detect my gifts when they were given because something inside me said, okay, that’s it. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to write things down. I want to do that all my life. That’s what I’m going to be. That’s who I am.

  MAC: In one of your books, you point out this question that people ask: “what do you want to be?” They don’t ask “who” or “how do you want to be?” I typically ask, because people know you as your profession, but who are you beyond that? How do you move through the world?

  NSN: I think I always saw myself as an observer. I always felt like my job is to be a witness. I’m not a full Arab, I’m not a full American. I always felt like I was a little bit on the sidelines, but I was in a spot where I had a good view. I could see what others did, I could watch, and I could absorb and put pieces together that made sense to me. That’s who I am. I knew it. I was confident in it. Even now my mother and I talk about it and she says, suddenly you just saw yourself as a writing person. It was your activity. It was what you did when you were at your desk alone and in your room. It went on from there. From the age of six, I was able to feel that others could know what you mean.

  MAC: Who we are also has to do with the people we carry with us. In your book, Transfer, the way that you write about your father, I could see how much you love him. He just seemed so fiercely hopeful and joyous despite the hardship that he experienced. It seems that you carry those qualities as well. I was thinking about this when I was reading one of your poems, “Break the Worry Cocoon,” where you write: “How did you survive so much hurt and remain gracious?” Then of course, too, with your magnificent poem “Kindness.” Can you share the story behind this poem?

  NSN: Yes. My dear Michael and I had gotten married and flown straight away to South America. We were young kids, naive, big dreams, big plans, and we had this somewhat ridiculous plan that he had made up that I just signed onto to travel the full length of South America from top to bottom by road. If you look at a map, that looks doable, but if you consider the details and the possibilities of trauma and tragedy that may occur along the way, there are many. We were robbed on one of the first buses that we took. It was very scary, a whole gang of robbers out in the countryside, in the mountains at night, in the country of Colombia. Then someone else who was on the bus, the Indian, the poor dear Indian whom I thought of all these years was murdered because he had nothing for them to take. I’d never been in a situation where someone was murdered. I realize lots of people have, in the world, been in that situation and it’s unthinkable. Going back to the town we had come from, where we’d actually gotten on the bus seemed like a better plan than going forward. We had nothing at this point, just nothing. We had no tickets, no money, no passports, nothing. Suddenly, you’re catapulted into this situation and it’s the days of pre-internet, and you don’t have a cell phone, and we knew no one. It was pretty daunting. We had to talk our way back onto the bus to go back to the town we had come from without having any money to pay them. We got back there and then various quick plans ensued. I ended up sitting alone in the plaza, in the town of Popayán, a beautiful town that would end up being devastated by an earthquake. It was like tragedy surrounded that place.

  I’d always been a person who believed that if you were in a really bad place, you just needed to get very, very quiet and listen, and maybe ask a question into the air. Maybe some people would call it meditating, some would call it praying, beseeching, but you needed to quiet your mind. I heard this poem, and I heard it in this woman’s voice being spoken to me. I pulled that little notebook out. I wrote it down, as I heard it. I felt like a scribe in that moment. It was like nothing can get in the way of my copying this poem down right now, that’s what I’m here to do. After I finished writing the full draft, maybe two lines changed. Only a few words in them changed. Basically, I copied it down verbatim. I stood up, took a breath, put that notebook back in my pocket, felt as if a gift had been given, I had been there to receive it. Suddenly, I knew two things that I could do to survive at that moment. I could figure out how to carry on.

  It was as if, listening for a poem in a time of extreme stress, I was given the poem of my lifetime, because I think without a doubt, I could make the generic statement that that’s been the poem that most people want. They want to copy it or put it in their anthologies or hang it on their refrigerator, or I get letters saying, “I read this poem to my friend whose son just died.” I’ve heard about this poem all my life now and I am very grateful for that. I don’t claim it still, to this day. I feel that it’s a poem that found its way to me.

  I often have told kids that if you are a person in the habit of listening to yourself, to others, and then to your memory, then you may be more likely to hear other incredible things like a tree talk to you when you need a tree to talk to you, or the future give you a little bit of a direction. Maybe even you will hear a voice from your past giving you some guidance that you need right at that moment when you need it. I have felt that happen many times. I’m sure that it’s common that you suddenly hear the voice of your teacher from long ago. You haven’t even thought of that person in years, or seen them in many years, and suddenly, you hear something they used to suggest to their class and it comes back to you right when you needed it. There’s so much interesting listening that we can do. I think that kind of listening, it’s here to serve us, but also, we have to be ready for it.

  MAC: Yes. You’ve been listening and paying attention, it seems like your whole life. Throughout your work, it’s clear that you notice the beauty of everyday things. In your poem “The Traveling Onion,” I love the line “all small forgotten miracles.” In your poem “Broken,” this also really pierced me: “Thank you ankles, thank you wrists, how many gifts have we not named?” I’ve always believed that there are so many quiet offerings all around us and that all we really have to do is pay attention to see them. I would love to hear a little bit more about your thoughts on these teeny miracles of the everyday, because I feel like that’s how we find meaning in our life.

  NSN: Yes, it is how we find meaning and it costs nothing. We’re all in it all the time, but we’re so distractible. There are so many things that take us away from that quiet every single day. We wake up with our to-do lists imprinted on our brains. Many times, we just don’t take that quiet time, or what might be offered to us. I used to get in trouble a lot when I was a kid in elementary school for, well, what the teacher would call daydreaming. It was daydreaming, but I always felt that it was almost deeper. I remember wanting to respond and say something like, “Well, it’s not just daydreaming. I’m in a hypnotic trance, thinking about the blood inside my body right now, and all the different things it’s doing that I will never see. I just think it’s really important to thank that blood or be aware of that blood because we don’t even really feel it.” I remember having all these excuses in my mind for why I wasn’t paying attention in math or something because there was so much to think about. Of course, being in school in a class that you weren’t very interested in was a good place to do it as was writing poems in the margins of all my school notebooks, which I always did from first grade on, but that feeling of being transported by the miracle that we’re living inside of it every minute, and we often don’t even think about it.

  MAC: It’s the biggest miracle. Recently I had pneumonia, and when it finally resolved, I felt this huge feeling of gratitude–and oh, like I was a different person almost. I had a newfound joy and gratefulness. Now here I am again, all nervous about a potentially scary thing I have to see the doctor about tomorrow. I’m back in the same worry loop of “Uh-oh.” I’m anxiety-prone anyway, I know a lot of people are. Our worry is just looking for somewhere to land. When I think of it that way, it helps me a little bit to dissolve the worry, because it’s like, okay, this is not really something I need to be focusing my attention on. It’s just that I have this in me, to fixate on something, and I’m choosing to look at this little thing right now. I keep thinking, how can I just stay in this place of gratitude all the time for my health? Be grateful that I no longer have pneumonia? How do we carry that gratitude and not just forget about it a week later?

  NSN: It is hard for us as human beings to carry the gratitude long enough because of that distractible issue. We get distracted by our next worry or complaint or headline or what’s going on down the street or some crazy thing comes along and distracts us again. We slowly slide off the path of gratitude. I do think that the morning gratitude notebook, which is something that many people talk about, and many people do in the world, I think it’s a good tendency. I think that can be helpful because it reminds you on a daily basis of what you have. Again, you could do a morning and evening gratitude notebook. “That thing I worried about that was going to happen today didn’t happen.” It could be that simple.

  MAC: Yes. I wanted to talk to you about your magnificent book of poems, Voices in the Air, on the people who stay with us—who has stayed with you? I love the feeling the title evokes. In the book you wrote a poem for the late John O’Donoghue. His work and his words have stayed with me for all these years as well. When you wrote that poem, you had never met him in person, right?

  NSN: No, I never met him, we were pen pals. The irony is, so many people I know knew him. Some of my friends knew him intimately, knew him for years and drove buses for him on his retreats in Ireland. I could have known him and I wish, of course, that I had made an effort to go actually meet him, even when he was in the United States or in Ireland, either one, but being taken to his house after he died was just an overwhelmingly intense experience. To look through his windows after reading his letters for years. He was so sweet and tender and beautiful in his letters and he originally wrote to me asking if he could quote from my poems in his talks, or in a book or something, or if he could use them in his retreats. I said, “Of course, do whatever you want with them.” We just went back and forth like that, and then he would send me his books, and I would always be happy when I got this package tied up from Ireland. I wish I had known him, he was such a beloved man, but I do know him because I knew his voice.

  MAC: Speaking of the people we carry close, in Voices in the Air you also write “people do not pass away, they die and then they stay,” which I wholeheartedly feel too. Whose voices do you continue to carry with you the most?

  NSN: Thanks for mentioning those two things. I’ve always been very cognizant of voices in the air, although I don’t usually hear them as distinctly as I did with the “Kindness” poem, but without a doubt, I carry my father’s and I hear him all the time. For poets, I carry W.S. Merwin and William Stafford. Those were two of my favorite poets from my teenage years, whose voices live in me forever. I am such a grateful reader of their work. I had no idea that I would become personal friends with both of them. I feel very lucky to have known them. Also, so many women like Lucille Clifton, whom I valued her voice and her strength and her counsel, her mighty spirit. I feel like her voice is with me always. My Palestinian grandmother is with me, and even though we didn’t speak the same language, I feel that her perspective is with me. Those would be some of my main voices that I regularly listen to.

  MAC: Beautiful. My own paternal grandmother sparked my love of cooking, writing, reading, music and creating. She too certainly wandered, she and my grandfather, they moved a lot. They were journalists. She was working for The New York Times, he was working for TIME and they moved to Bogota, Colombia, where they lived for many, many years—where my dad was born.

  NSN: That’s fascinating, I did the “Kindness” poem coming out of Colombia too. I love hearing about her and that she’s so much with you, she’s in you. Isn’t it incredible how you’re manifesting her. That’s what I think about. One of the reasons I don’t like the phrase “somebody passes away,” it’s so flimsy, it’s so vague, it sounds just like a wisp in the wind. No, they don’t, they die and then they stay in so many ways within us, around us in everything they loved. I just feel very, very strongly about that, but in the manifestation of her, you are carrying her and she’s staying.

  —

  Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian-American poet, previous editor of poems for the New York Times Sunday magazine, and from 2019-2021 she was the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate. Nye has written or edited more than thirty books, including Cast Away, The Tiny Journalist, Voices in the Air, and Everything Comes Next.

  Montserrat Andrée Carty is a writer and photographer. In addition to writing and making photos, she hosts the podcast Musings of the Artist and is the Interviews Editor for Hunger Mountain. She is currently a MFA in Writing candidate at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is working on a hybrid essay collection on home and belonging.

• Associated Press - https://apnews.com/article/naomi-shihab-nye-wallace-stevens-award-ed4498022b347780ba1bdda556043f7f

  Poet Naomi Shihab Nye receives $100,000 lifetime achievement award
  Updated 9:51 AM EDT, October 18, 2024
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  NEW YORK (AP) — Naomi Shihab Nye is this year’s winner of the Wallace Stevens Award, a $100,000 lifetime achievement honor named for the celebrated 20th century poet.

  Nye’s prize was announced Friday by the Academy of American Poets, which has previously given the award to Louise Glück, John Ashbery and Rita Dove among others. Nye, 72, is known for such collections as “Fuel,” “Yellow Queen” and “Grace Notes,” which came out this year.

  “In a stunning spectrum of works published in a period beginning nearly fifty years ago, Naomi Shihab Nye has borne witness to the complexities of cultural difference that connect us as human beings, evidencing a firm commitment to the poet as bearer of light and hope,” Academy Chancellor Afaa Michael Weaver said in a statement.

  “In celebrating her Palestinian heritage with a gentle but unflinching commitment, her body of work is a rare and precious living entity in our time, when the tragic conflict between Gaza and Israel threatens to deepen wounds and resentments everywhere.

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  The academy also announced that it had awarded Evie Shockley the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which includes a $25,000 stipend and residency at the Eliot House in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams and Claudia Rankine are among previous Fellowship winners.

  Shockley’s “suddenly we” was a National Book Award finalist last year. Her other books include “semiautomatic,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2018.

  “In her poetry, she uses the persons of history in the way that other writers and landscape painters use the colors of the light on things to create space and time,” Academy Chancellor Ed Roberson said in a statement.

  ___
  The story has been updated to correct the prize money to $100,000, from $150,000.

• Poetry Foundation website - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/naomi-shihab-nye

  Naomi Shihab Nye
  B. 1952

  Share
  White woman with long hair in low ponytail smiling in front of a white wall
  Photo by Michael Nye
  Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father was a Palestinian refugee and her mother an American of German and Swiss descent, and Nye spent her adolescence in both Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas. She earned her BA from Trinity University in San Antonio. Nye is the recipient of numerous honors and awards for her work, including the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Book Critics Circle, the Lavan Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Carity Randall Prize, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry award, the Robert Creeley Prize, and many Pushcart Prizes. She has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and she was a Witter Bynner Fellow. From 2010 to 2015 she served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018 she was awarded the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters. Nye was the Poetry Foundation's Young People's Poet Laureate from 2019-2022.

  Nye’s experience of both cultural difference and different cultures has influenced much of her work. Known for poetry that lends a fresh perspective to ordinary events, people, and objects, Nye has said that, for her, “the primary source of poetry has always been local life, random characters met on the streets, our own ancestry sifting down to us through small essential daily tasks.” In her work, according to Jane Tanner in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “Nye observes the business of living and the continuity among all the world’s inhabitants … She is international in scope and internal in focus.” Nye is also considered one of the leading female poets of the American Southwest. A contributor to Contemporary Poets wrote that she “brings attention to the female as a humorous, wry creature with brisk, hard intelligence and a sense of personal freedom unheard of” in the history of pioneer women.

  Nye continues to live and work in San Antonio, Texas. “My poems and stories often begin with the voices of our neighbors, mostly Mexican American, always inventive and surprising,” Nye wrote for Four Winds Press. “I never get tired of mixtures.” A contributor to Contemporary Southern Writers wrote that Nye’s poetry “is playfully and imaginatively instructive, borrows from Eastern and Middle Eastern and Native American religions, and resembles the meditative poetry of William Stafford, Wallace Stevens, and Gary Snyder.” Nye’s first two chapbooks were published in the 1970s. Both Tattooed Feet (1977) and Eye-to-Eye (1978) are written in free verse and structured around the theme of a journey or quest. They announced Nye as a “wandering poet,” one interested in travel, place, and cultural exchange. In her first full-length collection, Different Ways to Pray (1980), Nye explores the differences between, and shared experiences of, cultures from California to Texas, from South America to Mexico. In “Grandfather’s Heaven,” a child declares: “Grandma liked me even though my daddy was a Moslem.” As Tanner observed, “with her acceptance of different ‘ways to pray’ is also Nye’s growing awareness that living in the world can sometimes be difficult.”

  Nye’s next books include On the Edge of the Sky (1981), Hugging the Jukebox (1982), a full-length collection that also won the Voertman Poetry Prize, and Yellow Glove (1986). In Hugging the Jukebox, Nye emphasized the ordinary connections between diverse peoples and the perspectives of those in other lands. She writes: “We move forward, / confident we were born into a large family, / our brothers cover the earth.” Reviewers praised the book, noting Nye’s warmth and celebratory tone. Writing in the Village Voice, Mary Logue commented that in Nye’s poems about daily life, “Nye often pulls gold from the ordinary.” The poems in Yellow Glove presented a perspective tempered by tragedy and sorrow. In “Blood” Nye considers the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. She describes a café in combat-weary Beirut, bemoans “a world where no one saves anyone,” and observes “The Gardener” for whom “everything she planted gave up under the ground.” Georgia Review contributor Philip Booth declared that Nye brings “home to readers both how variously and how similarly all people live.” In Red Suitcase (1994), Nye continued to explore the effect of on-going violence on everyday life in the Middle East. Writing for Booklist, Pat Monaghan explained that “some of her most powerful poems deal with her native land’s continuing search for peace and the echoes of that search that resound in an individual life. Nye is a fluid poet, and her poems are also full of the urgency of spoken language. Her direct, unadorned vocabulary serves her well: ‘A boy filled a bottle with water. / He let it sit. / Three days later it held the power / of three days.’ Such directness has its own mystery, its own depth and power, which Nye exploits to great effect.”

  Nye’s next book, Fuel (1998), received wide acclaim. The poems range over a variety of subjects, settings and scenes. Reviewing the book for Ploughshares, Victoria Clausi regarded it as, above all, an attempt at connection: “Nye’s best poems often act as conduits between opposing or distant forces. Yet these are not didactic poems that lead to forced epiphanic moments. Rather, the carefully crafted connections offer bridges on which readers might find their own stable footing, enabling them to peek over the railings at the lush scenery.” Like her mentor, William Stafford, Nye again and again manifests her “belief in the value of the overlooked, the half-forgotten,” wrote Clausi, as well as investigating global concerns like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A reviewer for Publisher’s Weekly found that “Nye’s witnessings of everyday life and strife never quite acquire collective force, yet they convey a delicate sense of moral concern and a necessary sense of urgency.”

  After the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, Nye became an active voice for Arab Americans, speaking out against both terrorism and prejudice. The lack of understanding between Americans and Arabs led her to collect poems she had written which dealt with the Middle East and her experiences as an Arab American into one volume. 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Publisher’s Weekly declared that it was “an excellent way to invite exploration and discussion of events far away and their impact here at home.” Nye’s next book, You and Yours (2005), continued to explore the Middle East and the possibilities of poetic response. Divided into two sections, the first deals with Nye’s personal experiences as a mother and traveler and intersperses Nye’s typical free-verse with prose poems. Part two examines the Middle East with “indignity and compassion,” according to Publisher’s Weekly. Donna Seaman wrote that the book is “tender yet forceful, funny and commonsensical, reflective and empathic,” adding, “Nye writes radiant poems of nature and piercing poems of war, always touching base with homey details and radiant portraits of family and neighbors. Nye’s clarion condemnation of prejudice and injustice reminds readers that most Americans have ties to other lands and that all concerns truly are universal.” The book received the Isabel Gardner Poetry Award. Nye’s recent collections of poetry include Transfer (2011), Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018), and The Tiny Journalist (2019).

  In addition to poetry, Nye has written fiction for children, poetry and song recordings, and poetry translations. She has also published a book of essays, Never in a Hurry (1996), and edited several anthologies, including the award-winning This Same Sky (1992), which represents 129 poets from sixty-eight countries. In her introduction to the anthology Nye writes, “Whenever someone suggests ‘how much is lost in translation!’ I want to say, ‘Perhaps—but how much is gained!’” Booklist critic Hazel Rochman called it “an extraordinary anthology, not only in its global range … but also in the quality of the selections and the immediacy of their appeal.” Nye also compiled and edited a bilingual anthology of Mexican poetry, The Tree Is Older Than You Are (1995), and she edited the collection I Feel a Little Jumpy around You (1996), which combines 194 “his and her” poems, pairing a poem written by a man with one written by a woman. Nye’s anthology The Space between Our Footsteps (1998) is a collection of the work of 127 contemporary Middle Eastern poets and artists representing nineteen countries.

  As a children’s writer, Nye is acclaimed for her sensitivity and cultural awareness. Her book Sitti’s Secrets (1994) concerns an Arab American child’s relationship with her sitti—Arabic for grandmother—who lives in a Palestinian village. Booklist praised Nye for capturing the emotions of the “child who longs for a distant grandparent” as well as for writing a narrative that deals personally with Arabs and Arab Americans. In 1997 Nye published Habibi, her first young-adult novel. Readers meet Liyana Abboud, an Arab American teen who moves with her family to her Palestinian father’s native country during the 1970s, only to discover that the violence in Jerusalem has not yet abated. As Liyana notes, “in Jerusalem, so much old anger floated around … [that] the air felt stacked with weeping and raging and praying to God by all the different names.” Autobiographical in its focus, Habibi was praised by Karen Leggett, who noted in the New York Times Book Review that the novel magnifies through the lens of adolescence “the joys and anxieties of growing up” and that Nye is “meticulously sensitive to this rainbow of emotion.” Nye sees her writing for children as part of her larger goals as a writer. As Nye explained to a Children’s Literature Review contributor, “to counteract negative images conveyed by blazing headlines, writers must steadily transmit simple stories closer to heart and more common to everyday life. Then we will be doing our job.” Nye has since published poetry for young adults, including Come With Me: Poems for a Journey (2000) and A Maze Me: Poems for Girls (2005). Nye has received many awards for her writing for children, including the NSK Neustadt Award for Children’s Literature and the 2018 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award from the American Library Association.

  Nye has been affiliated with the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas and poetry editor for the Texas Observer for over 20 years. She is a professor of creative writing at Texas State University. Nye told Contemporary Authors: “I have always loved the gaps, the spaces between things, as much as the things. I love staring, pondering, mulling, puttering. I love the times when someone or something is late—there’s that rich possibility of noticing more, in the meantime … Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.”

• Wikipedia -

  Naomi Shihab Nye

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Naomi Shihab Nye
  Nye at a San Antonio book signing, 2008
  Nye at a San Antonio book signing, 2008
  Born Naomi Shihab
  March 12, 1952 (age 72)
  St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
  Occupation
  Poeteditorauthorsongwriter
  Education Trinity University (BA)
  Spouse Michael Nye
  Children 1
  Naomi Shihab Nye (Arabic: نعومي شهاب ناي; born March 12, 1952) is an Arab American poet, editor, songwriter, and novelist. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she began composing her first poetry at the age of six. In total, she has published or contributed to over 30 volumes of poetry. Her works include poetry, young-adult fiction, picture books, and novels.[1] Nye received the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature in honor of her entire body of work as a writer,[2] and in 2019 the Poetry Foundation designated her the Young People's Poet Laureate for the 2019–21 term.[3]

  Early life
  Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet and songwriter born in 1952 to a Palestinian father, Aziz Shihab, who worked as a journalist, editor and writer, and American mother, Miriam Allwardt Shihab, an artist who worked as a Montessori school teacher.[4] Her father grew up in Palestine. He and his family became refugees in the 1948 Nakba, when the state of Israel was created. She has said her father "seemed a little shell-shocked when I was a child."[5]

  She grew up initially in Ferguson, St. Louis County, Missouri. Her mother studied under Philip Guston and Max Beckmann at Washington University in St. Louis.[6] In 1966, when Nye was 14, the family moved to the West Bank, then part of Jordan, when her father's mother was sick.[7] After less than a year,[8] before the 1967 Six-Day War occurred,[4] they moved to San Antonio, Texas.[9]

  Nye graduated from Robert E. Lee High School, where she was editor of the literary magazine. She earned a BA in English and world religions from Trinity University[10] in 1974 and has lived in San Antonio since.[4]

  Career
  Teaching writing
  After graduation, Nye worked as a writer-in-schools with the Texas Commission on the Arts. She has continued to teach writing workshops, mostly to kids.[4] Currently, she teaches creative writing at Texas State University.[11]

  Writing
  Nye characterizes herself as a "wandering poet," and says that much of her poetry is inspired by her childhood memories and her travels. She considers San Antonio her current home, "San Antonio feels most like home as I have lived here the longest. But everywhere can be home the moment you unpack, make a tiny space that feels agreeable". San Antonio is the inspiration behind many of her poems.[12] Both roots and sense of place are major themes in her body of work. Her poems are frank and accessible, often making use of ordinary images in startling ways. Her ability to enter into foreign experiences and chronicle them from the inside is reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop, while her simple and direct "voice" is akin to that of her mentor William Stafford.

  Her first collection of poems, Different Ways to Pray, explored the theme of similarities and differences between cultures, which would become one of her lifelong areas of focus. Her other books include poetry collections 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, Red Suitcase, and Fuel; a collection of essays entitled Never in a Hurry; a young-adult novel called Habibi (the autobiographical story of an Arab-American teenager who moves to Jerusalem in the 1970s) and picture book Lullaby Raft, which is also the title of one of her two albums of music. (The other is called Rutabaga-Roo; both were limited-edition.)

  Nye's first two chapter books, Tattooed Feet (1977) and Eye-to-Eye (1978), are written in free verse and possess themes of questing. Nye's first full-length collection, Different Ways to Pray (1980), explores the differences between and shared experiences of cultures from California to Texas and from South America to Mexico. Hugging the Jukebox (1982), a full-length collection that won the Voertman Poetry Prize, focuses on the connections between diverse peoples and on the perspectives of those in other lands. Yellow Glove (1986) presents poems with more tragic and sorrowful themes. According to the Poetry Foundation, Fuel (1998) may be Nye's most acclaimed volume and ranges over a variety of subjects, scenes and settings.[13]

  Nye's poem Famous was referenced and quoted in full by Judge Andre Davis in his concurring opinion on the case G. G. v. Gloucester County School Board.[14]

  Her poem So much happiness[15] was included in the 'Happiness' edition of Parabola.[16]

  Editing anthologies
  Nye has edited many anthologies of poems, for audiences both young and old. One of the best-known is This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from around the World, which contains translated work by 129 poets from 68 different countries. Her most recent anthology is called Is This Forever, Or What?: Poems & Paintings from Texas.

  Awards and recognition
  Nye has won many awards and fellowships, among them four Pushcart Prizes, the Jane Addams Children's Book Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and many notable book and best book citations from the American Library Association, and a 2,000 Witter Bynner Fellowship.[17] In 1997, Trinity University, her alma mater, honored her with the Distinguished Alumna Award.

  In 1997, Nye became a Guggenheim Poetry Fellow. In 2000, Nye became a Witter Bynner Fellow, awarded by the Library of Congress. In 2002, she became a Lannan Literary Fellow.[18] In June 2009, Nye was named as one of PeaceByPeace.com's first peace heroes.[19] In 2013, Nye won the Robert Creeley Award.[20]

  In October 2012, she was named laureate of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature.[2] The NSK Prize is a juried award sponsored by the University of Oklahoma and World Literature Today magazine. In her nominating statement, Ibtisam Barakat, the juror who championed Nye for the award wrote, "Naomi's incandescent humanity and voice can change the world, or someone's world, by taking a position not one word less beautiful than an exquisite poem." Barakat commended her work by saying, "Naomi's poetry masterfully blends music, images, colors, languages, and insights into poems that ache like a shore pacing in ebb and flow, expecting the arrival of meaning."[21]

  In 2019, the Poetry Foundation designated Nye their Young People's Poet Laureate for the 2019–21 term. The foundation's announcement characterized Nye's writing style as one that "moves seamlessly between ages in a way that is accessible, warm, and sophisticated even for the youngest of readers."[3]

  In 2023, she was awarded an honorary degree from Vermont College of Fine Arts.[22]

  Personal life
  Although she calls herself a "wandering poet", Nye refers to San Antonio as her home and lives there with her family. She says a visit to her grandmother in the West Bank village of Sinjil was a life-changing experience. In 1978, she married Michael Nye, who worked initially as an attorney and later on photography and on writing on topics including hunger, teenage pregnancy and mental illness. They have one son.[4]

  Published works
  Poetry
  Different Ways to Pray: Poems. Breitenbush Publications. 1980. ISBN 978-0-932576-04-0.
  On the Edge of the Sky. Iguana Press. 1981.
  Hugging the Jukebox. Dutton. 1982. ISBN 978-0-525-47703-7.
  Yellow Glove. Breitenbush Books. 1986. ISBN 978-0-932576-41-5.
  Invisible: Poems. The Trilobite Press. 1987.
  Mint. State Street Press Chapbooks. 1991.
  Red Suitcase: Poems. BOA Editions. 1994. ISBN 978-1-880238-14-1.
  Words Under the Words. The Eighth Mountain Press. 1994. ISBN 978-0933377295.
  Fuel: poems. BOA Editions, Ltd. 1998. ISBN 978-1-880238-63-9.
  Mint Snowball. Anhinga Press. 2001. ISBN 9780938078685.
  19 varieties of gazelle: poems of the Middle East. HarperCollins. 2002. ISBN 978-0-06-009766-0.
  Baby Radar. lllustrated by Nancy Carpenter. Greenwillow Books, 2003.[23][24]
  You & yours: poems. BOA Editions, Ltd. 2005. ISBN 978-1-929918-69-0.
  A Maze Me: Poems for Girls. Greenwillow Books. 2005. ISBN 978-0060581893
  Tender Spot: Selected Poems. Bloodaxe Books. 2008. ISBN 978-1-85224-791-1
  Transfer. BOA Editions, Ltd. 2011. ISBN 978-1934414644.
  Sometimes I Pretend: A Poem [artist's book]. Santa Cruz, California: Peter and Donna Thomas. 2014.
  The Tiny Journalist: Poems. BOA Editions, Ltd. 2019. ISBN 9781942683728
  "Kindness"
  Children's poetry
  What Have You Lost? (with Michael Nye). Greenwillow Books. 1999. ISBN 0688161847.
  Come With Me: Poems for a Journey. Greenwillow Books. 2000. ISBN 9780688159467.
  Is This Forever or What?: Poems and Paintings from Texas. Greenwillow Books. 2003. ISBN 0060511788.
  19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East. Greenwillow Books. 2005. ISBN 978-0060504045.
  Honeybee: poems & short prose. Greenwillow Books. 2008. ISBN 978-0060853907.
  Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners. Greenwillow Books. 2018. ISBN 9780062691842.
  Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems. Greenwillow Books. 2020. ISBN 9780063013452
  Cast Away: Poems of Our Time. Greenwillow Books. 2021 ISBN 9780062907707
  Grace Notes: Poems about Families. Greenwillow Books. 2024. ISBN 9780062691873
  Poetry in anthologies
  The Best American Poetry. Scribner Poetry. 2003. ISBN 0743203887
  When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women. Autumn House Press. 2009. ISBN 9781932870268.
  Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. University of Georgia Press. 2018. ISBN 978-0820353159.
  Thanku: Poems of Gratitude. Millbrook Press. 2019. ISBN 978-1541523630.
  Other children's books
  Sitti’s Secrets. Illustrated by Nancy Carpenter. Four Winds Press, 1994.[25]
  Essays
  Never in a Hurry: Essays on People and Places. University of South Carolina Press. 1996. ISBN 9781570030826.
  Novels
  Habibi. Simon Pulse. 1999. ISBN 978-0689825231.
  Going, Going. Greenwillow Books. 2005. ISBN 9780688161859
  The Turtle of Oman. Greenwillow Books. 2014. ISBN 9780062019721.
  The Turtle of Michigan. Greenwillow Books. 2022. ISBN 9780063014169.
  Short stories
  There is no Long Distance Now. HarperCollins. 2011. ISBN 978-0-06-201965-3.
  Hamadi
  Tomorrow, Summer
  Discography
  Rutabaga-Roo – I've Got a Song and It's for You (Flying Cat, 1979)
  Editor
  Naomi Shihab Nye, ed. (1995). The Tree Is Older Than You Are: A Bilingual Gathering of Poems & Stories from Mexico with Paintings by Mexican Artists. Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing. ISBN 9780689802973.
  Naomi Shihab Nye, Paul B. Janeczko, eds. (1996). I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You: Paired Poems by Men & Women. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 9780689813412.
  Naomi Shihab Nye, ed. (1996). This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World. Aladdin Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0-689-80630-8.
  Naomi Shihab Nye, ed. (1998). The Space Between Our Footsteps. Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing. ISBN 978-0689812330.
  Naomi Shihab Nye; Ashley Bryan, eds. (2000). Salting the Ocean: 100 Poems by Young Poets. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-688-16193-4.
  Naomi Shihab Nye, ed. (2010). Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25. Greenwillow Books. ISBN 9780061896378.
  Critical studies
  Abouddahab, Rédouane. "The Life of ‘Words under the Words.’ The Father Figure, Mourning, and the Music of Desire in Naomi Shihab Nye’s ‘Brushing Lives.’" Revue Française d’Études Américaines 170 (2022): 83-96.
  Abouddahab, Rédouane. "The Father as a Figure of Exile: Desire and Sublimation in Naomi Shihab Nye’s ‘My Father and the Figtree’." In S. Brownlie and R. Abouddahab, eds., Figures of the Migrant: The Roles of Literature and the Arts in Representing Migration, New York and London, Routledge, 2022, 127-146.
  Gómez-Vega, Ibis. "The Art of Telling Stornoyies in the Poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye." MELUS 26.4 (Winter 2001): 245-252.
  Gómez-Vega, Ibis. "Extreme Realities: Naomi Shihab Nye's Essays and Poems." Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 30 (2010): 109-133.
  Mercer, Lorraine, and Linda Strom. "Counter Narratives: Cooking Up Stories of Love and Loss in Naomi Shihab Nye's Poetry and Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent." MELUS 32.4 (Winter 2007):
  Orfalea, Gregory. "Doomed by Our Blood to Care: The Poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye." Paintbrush 18.35 (Spring 1991): 56-66.
  Forewords
  Clack, Cary, (2009). Clowns and Rats Scare Me. Trinity University Press. ISBN 9781595340375
  Stafford, William, (2014). The Osage Orange Tree. Trinity University Press. ISBN 9781595341846
  Ornelas, Christopher, (2017). Name Them—They Fly Better: Pat Hammond’s Theory of Aerodynamics. Trinity University Press. ISBN 9781595348197

• Academy of American Poets website - https://poets.org/poet/naomi-shihab-nye

  Naomi Shihab Nye
  1952 –
  Naomi Shihab Nye was born on March 12, 1952, in St. Louis to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Palestine, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she later received her BA in English and world religions from Trinity University.

  Nye is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Grace Notes: Poems about Family (HarperCollins, 2024); Cast Away: Poems for Our Time (Greenwillow Books, 2020); The Tiny Journalist (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2019); Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (Greenwillow Books, 2018); Transfer (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2011); You and Yours (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2005), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award; and 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (Greenwillow Books, 2002), a collection of new and selected poems. She is also the author of several books of poetry and fiction for children, including Habibi (Simon Pulse, 1997), for which she received the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award in 1998.

  Nye gives voice to her experience as an Arab American through poems about heritage and peace that overflow with a humanitarian spirit. About her work, the poet William Stafford has said, “Her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life.”

  Nye’s poems and short stories have appeared in various journals and reviews throughout North America, Europe, and the Middle and Far East. She has traveled to the Middle East and Asia for the United States Information Agency (USIA) three times, promoting international goodwill through the arts.

  Nye’s other honors include awards from the International Poetry Forum and the Texas Institute of Letters, the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum, the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. She has been a Lannan Fellow, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. In 1988, she received the Academy of American Poets’ Lavan Award, judged by W. S. Merwin. In 2024, the Academy presented her with its Wallace Stevens Award.

  Nye served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2009 to 2014, and was the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2021. In April 2022, for National Poetry Month, Nye served as the Guest Editor of Poem-a-Day. She lives in San Antonio.

• Porter House Review - https://porterhousereview.org/articles/an-interview-with-naomi-shihab-nye/

  Writing Our Way Through: A Conversation with Naomi Shihab Nye

  Feb 19 ● BY 2023-2024 Managing Editor Team

  Join the Porter House Review in a conversation with acclaimed poet – and our professor at Texas State University – Naomi Shihab Nye as she generously discusses the role of the poet in a time of omnipresent political turmoil.

  PHR Editors: Hi Naomi! Thanks for chatting with your friends and students over at Porter House Review. What projects are you working on these days?

  Naomi Shihab Nye: Two new books coming out this year are Grace Notes: Poems About Families (my own poems) and I Know About a Thousand Things, The Writings of Ann Alejandro of Uvalde, Texas, edited by Marion Winik and yours truly. This will be a Wittliff Series book published by Texas A&M University Press. We feel lucky to have two esteemed Texas universities on board with our book by our great writer friend Ann, who died a few years ago.

  PHR: How are recent events impacting your work, if at all?

  Nye: Recent tragic world events, especially the genocide in Gaza, make me feel paralyzed and desperately sad. Creative work becomes more crucial for maintaining any semblance of sanity. I simply cannot grasp or accept the stone-age behaviors of nations and lack of empathy for all humans. Of course, I grieve the violence committed against innocent Israeli people and the wildly oversized vengeance by Israel, supported by the United States, that followed it. How do I speak of any of this as one little person?

  PHR: What is the role of the poet during times of war, crisis, and political division?

  Nye: The role of the poet is to try to keep speaking truth and shining a little light. The role of the poet is to stand up for human beings whose weeping voices are not being heard. The role of the poet is to make connections. My poems always stand up for humanity, hopefully. My slim book The Tiny Journalist tried to do this in every poem, I believe.

  PHR: What is the difference between a “bad” political poem and a “good” political poem?

  Nye: I don’t really favor calling things out as bad, except for stone-age weaponry and selfish, cruel politicians. Any poem that tries to speak up for truth or humanity would be a good poem in my opinion, but sometimes poems can be a little too didactic. Do this! Believe this! I don’t blame them though. We’re all desperate.

  PHR: When you’re writing a poem that turns out to be about racism, war, or some kind of injustice, at what point, if ever, do you begin to think about your future readers? Or in what specific ways does your sense of audience change when you’re writing about injustice, racism, and war?

  Nye: Poems are always trying to make contact, focus, find a voice that feels genuine. I must say the presence of “audience” becomes a gift a writer lives with—never feeling entirely alone, somehow. So, I guess I think about readers and writers as being of one tribe, one family, and I don’t think that sense of their presence really changes due to subject-matter. I definitely feel, when writing “politically,” that we make a chorus crying out for justice together—something like my husband and I felt when marching with 3,700 others at the Peace for Palestine rally on the main street of Honolulu the other day. Weeping to be part of a giant chorus invoking peace for people who can’t even hear us at that moment crying out—but the sense that none of us are alone in this concern felt supportive.

  It’s very hard to believe people are losing jobs, being condemned for supporting fellow human beings in Gaza and Palestine. My new friend, the wonderful poet Jordan Kapono Nakamura of Honolulu, dedicated his recent poem “Interview” on Poets.org to people who are losing work because of their support for Palestine. My Palestinian journalist father used to say, “People really need more information.” If Americans visit the region and see how Palestinians have been treated for so long, their opinions often change.

  People rarely mention that Palestinians are Semites too. So one might say the Israeli military and government itself has been, for a long time, excruciatingly anti-semitic. Why isn’t this ever pointed out? It’s bizarre. Also, if hostages were only released during cease-fire, why not cease for real? I salute all fellow Jewish brothers and sisters supporting Palestinians now and always. As a person from a West Bank family, originally of Jerusalem, made refugees in 1948 when their house was seized, I know the sorts of continuing horrors of injustice my own relatives have suffered for more than seventy years. If anyone pays attention to these facts, justice might be sooner in coming. Support education and food and healthcare, oh Americans! Stop sending weapons! This is an old, old cry.

  PHR: What does poetry do that media or journalism often doesn’t or can’t?

  Nye: Poetry cares. Poetry tries to sing the quiet, subtle stories. Poetry cherishes and protects details. Poetry listens to the ones who are not in the headlines.

  PHR: Much of your poetry focuses on children and their innocence. Do these poems resonate differently in light of the crisis today?

  Nye: The children are suffering problems the elders could not solve. Their pain and terror, their hope and apprehension of beauty and fun and future, should guide all our actions now and forever. How do we make them feel safe and treasured? I have always written for children in some way because they are most important and how we treat them is everything. They’re the best people.

  PHR: What does it mean to be a Palestinian poet right now?

  Nye: To be a Palestinian poet right now means caring more than ever about everything that makes us want to write poetry. We are here to love one another, to help, to support, to cherish. Violence gets us nowhere. Palestinians deserve all the human rights they have not had for so many years, just as anyone dreams of having. It is our job to speak of them and the injustice they have faced for so long in voices of peace and continuing hope. Because what else do we have? It is always our job as poets to make more connections. If we feel disenfranchised from official “positions,” we find ways to belong to one another through human-sized, gentle moves.

Nye, Naomi Shihab GRACE NOTES Greenwillow Books (Teen None) $19.99 5, 7 ISBN: 9780062691873

A powerful account of a mother's life, narrated in verse by award-winner Nye, the former Young People's Poet Laureate.

Nye describes small meaningful moments from major events in the life of her late mother, Miriam Naomi Allwardt Shihab. The opening poem introduces Miriam, explaining how she met Nye's Palestinian immigrant father in Kansas, marrying him only three months later. Subsequent entries delve into Miriam's mental health, which was affected by her rigid upbringing ("Her parents were tightly closed German boxes"); Miriam struggled with depression later in life ("You could never tell your friends. / Before I was born, my mama tried to die"). On the subject of her parents' marital conflict, Nye notes that "children who live in sad houses / hope to fix things." However, the poems also uphold Miriam's profoundly positive impact as a mother who passed on her global awareness and empathy, passion for the arts, and respect for diversity: "She never thought she was / the center of the world." Understanding her mother's mysteries becomes a quest for Nye to both understand herself and appreciate Miriam more deeply: "Maybe we are all born from our mother's kilns," she states in her introduction. Her writing dwells upon the secret mysteries of our lives and the grace it takes to forgive and love others. Through this intimate and compassionate exploration of one woman's life, readers receive an invitation to contemplate human interconnectedness.

Beautifully written poetry about the butterfly effect of human experience. (index) (Poetry. 13-18)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Nye, Naomi Shihab: GRACE NOTES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A793537037/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=923e3ed8. Accessed 28 Oct. 2024.

"Nye, Naomi Shihab: GRACE NOTES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A793537037/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=923e3ed8. Accessed 28 Oct. 2024.

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