Nathalie Handal

Biography

Nathalie Handal is a French-American poet and playwright born in Haiti to a Palestinian family from Bethlehem.. She has lived in France, the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Arab world. After earning a MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College, Vermont and a MPhil in English and Drama at the University of London, Handal became interested in the writing of Arab women in the 1990s. She currently has residences in both New York City and Paris, and is a professor at Columbia University.

Literary career

Handal is the author of five books of poetry, several plays and the editor of two anthologies. She is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, Centro Andaluz de las Letras Fellow, Fondazione di Venezia Fellow, recipient of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature 2011, the AE Ventures Fellowship, an Honored Finalist for the 2009 Gift of Freedom Award, and was shortlisted for New London Writers Awards and The Arts Council of England Writers Awards. She has also been involved as a writer, director, or producer in over twenty theatrical or film productions. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, such as Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Guardian, World Literature Today, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry New Zealand, Guernica Magazine, and The Nation; and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. She was the featured poet in the PBS NewsHour on April 20, 2009. Her book The Lives of Rain was shortlisted for the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and received the Menada Literary Award and Love and Strange Horses is the winner of the 2011 Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY Award), and an Honorable Mention at the San Francisco Book Festival and the New England Book Festival. The critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía (2012) consists of “poems of depth and weight, and the sorrowing song of longing and resolve.” The flash collection The Republics is lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers” and the winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing.

Handal has promoted international literature through translation and research, and edited The Poetry of Arab Women, an anthology that introduced several Arab women poets to a wider audience in the West and is used in university classes around the U.S. It was an Academy of American Poets bestseller, named one of the top 10 Feminist Books by The Guardian, and won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. She co-edited along with Tina Chang and Ravi Shankar the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond. She was Picador Guest Professor at Leipzig University, Germany, and is currently teaching at Columbia University and part of the Low-Residency MFA faculty at Sierra Nevada College.

Handal writes the literary travel column "The City and The Writer", for the online magazine Words Without Borders. She has also written a piece based upon a book of the King James Bible as part of the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty-Six Books.

Themes

In her collection Poet in Andalucía she goes back to Islamic Spain where Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived in relative harmony.

Building an Architecture for the Wanderer

"Groundbreaking poet, playwright, and editor Nathalie Handal is one of our most diverse contemporary writers, and as the Washington Independent Review of Books writes, it’s with “startling force [that she] is building an architecture for the wanderer.” Handal’s poem “Lady Liberty” was to appear on posters in New York City subways, buses, taxis, and on MetroCards as part of Poetry in Motion, a joint project of the MTA Arts for Transit & Urban Design and the Poetry Society of America, whose featured poems are read by more than seven million commuters daily.”

Published works