Nathalie Handal is an award-winning poet, playwright, and editor. She has lived in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Arab world. Her poetry collections include, The NeverField; The Lives of Rain, shortlisted for The Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the recipient of the Menada Literary Award; and Love and Strange Horses (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award 2011, and an Honorable Mention at the San Francisco Book Festival and the New England Book Festival. The New York Times says it is “a book that trembles with belonging (and longing).” She is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, a Fundación Araguaney 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. Handal was listed as one of the “100 Most Powerful Arab Women 2011” in a Special Report by ArabianBusiness.com. Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Kumunyakaa writes: “This cosmopolitan voice belongs to the human family, and it luxuriates in crossing necessary borders.” Her new collection, Poet in Andalucía, is forthcoming in Spring 2012.

Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, such as, The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetrywales, Ploughshares, Poetry New Zealand, Crab Orchard Review, and The Literary Review; and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. She has read her poetry worldwide, and 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. Her poetry CDs include, Traveling Rooms and Spell. She has also been involved either as a writer, director, or producer in over twenty theatrical and/or film productions worldwide. Ed Ochester writes, “If there is such a thing as a Renaissance figure among younger poets writing in America, that person is Nathalie Handal.”

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 National Book Award, 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 & Co). Nobel Laureate, Nadine Gordimer writes: “Assembled here not the Tower of Babel, but the astonishment and subtlety inherent in many languages and their experimental modes to expand the power of words. The editors have boldly envisaged and compiled a beautiful achievement for world literature.”

Handal received an MFA in Poetry from Bennington College, an MPhil in Drama and English from the University of London, and her undergraduate degree from Simmons College. She teaches and lectures nationally and internationally, most recently in Africa, at Columbia University and as Picador Guest Professor, Leipzig University, Germany. She is Books Review Editor and Tutor for Sable Literary Magazine and Forum, United Kingdom (www.sablelitmag.org); an Executive Board Member for Palfest; a Member of the Laboratory of Frontiers Studies at the Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil; and an Advisory Board Member for The Center for Literary Translation, Columbia University, and The Levantine Center, Los Angeles (www.levantinecenter.org). Handal writes the blog-column, The City and The Writer, for Words without Borders magazine.