Nathalie Handal is an award-winning poet, playwright, and writer. She has lived in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Arab world. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, such as, Poetrywales, Ploughshares, Poetry New Zealand, Stand Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, Perihelion, and The Literary Review; and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. She has been featured on PBS The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, NPR Radio as well as The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters, Mail & Guardian, The Jordan Times and Il Piccolo. Handal has read her poetry all around the world and was an Honored Finalist for the 2009 Freedom Award. She has also been involved either as a writer, director or producer in over twenty theatrical and/or film productions worldwide.

Her poetry collections include, The NeverField, The Lives of Rain, short-listed for The Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize/The Pitt Poetry Series and the recipient of the Menada Award, the poetry CDs Traveling Rooms and Spell, and most recently, Love and Strange Horses (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Kumunyakaa writes: “This cosmopolitan voice belongs to the human family, and it luxuriates in crossing necessary borders.”

She has promoted international literature through translation, research, and the editing of the groundbreaking The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, an Academy of American Poets bestseller and Winner of the Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Literary, and the co-editing along with Tina Chang and Ravi Shankar of the landmark anthology, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond (W.W. Norton).

Handal received an MFA in Poetry from Bennington College, an MPHIL in Drama and English from the University of London, a Post-Graduate Certificate in Fiction from Humber College, Canada, and her undergraduate degree from Simmons College. She teaches and lectures nationally and internationally, most recently in Africa and at Columbia University in New York City. She is Poetry Books Review Editor and Tutor for Sable Literary Magazine and Forum, United Kingdom (www.sablelitmag.org); an Advisory Board Member for The Center for Literary Translation at Columbia University, NYC (www.centerforliterarytranslation.org); an Advisory Board Member for The Levantine Center, Los Angeles (www.levantinecenter.org); and a Member of the Laboratory of Frontiers Studies at the Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil.