Naomi Shihab Nye: Poetry as Refuge

"Grief is something that, alas, as human beings we're just going to keep experiencing over and over and over again in all of its many manifestations. And I think poetry can help us know that we're not alone in experiencing it, that it's a place to place our pain, and to place our unresolved questions, our mysteries." - Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian-American writer, educator, and editor. Her published work includes poetry, children’s books and essays, and she has been awarded a Lifetime Achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle. She has also spent decades as an educator, visiting classrooms all around the world.

In this episode, producer Emily Bell speaks with Naomi Shihab Nye about finding inspiration in her father's notebooks, processing grief, and writing about Palestine. Naomi shares a selection of old and new works, including two from her book "Transfer."

CREDITS

Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, and Ilana Levinson. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.

BIO

Palestinian-American writer, editor and educator Naomi Shihab Nye grew up in Ferguson, Missouri, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she continues to live.

She is the Young People’s Poet Laureate of the United States (Poetry Foundation). Her late father Aziz Shihab was a journalist and author of Does the Land Remember Me? A Memoir of Palestine. She has been a visiting writer in hundreds of schools and communities all over the world for more than 40 years and has written or edited 35 books including collections of poetry, novels for teens, picture books, essays, very short fictional stories, anthologies of poetry. Her books Sitti’s Secrets, Habibi, This Same Sky, & The Tree is Older than You Are: Poems & Paintings from Mexico have been in print more than 20 years. Her volume 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Recent books include Everything Comes Next, Cast Away, The Tiny Journalist, and Voices in the Air. She is on faculty at Texas State University and won recent Lifetime Achievement Awards from the National Book Critics Circle and the Texas Institute of Letters. The Turtle of Oman (Greenwillow) a novel for children set in Muscat, will soon be followed by its sequel The Turtle of Michigan.

RESOURCES

• Naomi Shihab Nye at the Poetry Foundation
• Works by Naomi Shihab Nye at poets.org
• “This Court Decision in the Gavin Grimm Case Will Bring Tears to Your Eyes” (American Civil Liberties Union, 4/10/17)
• “A memorial to a great Arab American Journalist, Aziz Shihab” (Ray Hanania, The Arab Daily News, 10/28/07)
• “Texas journalist Aziz Shihab on 'Does the Land Remember Me?: A Memoir of Palestine'" (Michael King, The Austin Chronicle, 7/20/07)