Khaled Mattawa

was born in Libya in 1964. In 1995-96 he won the Alfred Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and in 1998 he was awarded a Guggenheim Poetry Fellowship. He has translated many Arab poets into English and won the University of Arkansas Press Award for Arabic Literature in Translation for Questions and Their Retinue, translations of poems by Hatif Janabi. His translation of Fadhil al-Azzawi’s collection In Every Well a Joseph is Weeping won QRL’s international poetry book competition in 1997. In 1999, he co-edited Post Gibran: Anthology of New Arab American Writing. His translations of Saadi Youssef, Without an Alphabet, Without a Face, was published in 2002, and was awarded the PEN poetry in Translation Prize His translation of selected poems of Fadhil al-Azzawi, Miracle Maker, by BOA Editions was published November 2003. He has published many of his own poems and his translations in literary magazines, and has two collections of his own poems, Ismailia Eclipse (Sheep Meadow Press, 1995) and Zodiac of Echoes (2003).

He teaches creative writing in the English faculty at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is also President of RAWI, the Arab-American writers organisation. He is a founding contributing editor of Banipal.