Episode 07: Naomi Shihab Nye
In this episode, acclaimed poet Naomi Shihab Nye discusses her collection of poems, The Tiny Journalist (2019), with Diana Abouali, director of the Arab American National Museum. The “tiny journalist” refers to Janna Jihad Ayyad, the Palestinian citizen journalist who has been documenting and reporting Israel’s colonization of her homeland since she was a young girl. Recorded a few weeks after the 2021 Israel attacks on Gaza ceased, Shihab Nye reflects on her identity as a Palestinian-American as well as the resilience of Palestinians in the face of ongoing adversity.
About Naomi Shihab Nye:
Palestinian-American Naomi Shihab Nye is an award-winning writer and editor whose work has appeared widely. She is the author and/or editor of more than 30 volumes.She recently wrote Cast Away: Poems for Our Time which was one of the Washington Post's best children’s books of 2020. Her new book is Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems.
Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, the Robert Creeley Prize, and "The Betty Prize" from Poets House, for service to poetry, and numerous honors for her children’s literature, including two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards. She was named the 2019-2021 Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. In 2020 she was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement by the National Book Critics Circle. In 2021 she was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Nye is Professor of Creative Writing - Poetry at Texas State University. She lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband, Michael, and their son, Madison.
