Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye (Arabic: نعومي شهاب ناي; born March 12, 1952) is a Palestinian American poet, editor, songwriter, and novelist. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she began composing her first poetry at the age of six. In total, she has published more than thirty-five books and contributed to hundreds of others. Her works include poetry, young-adult fiction, picture books, and novels. Nye has received numerous awards throughout her career including the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature, served as the Poetry Foundation's Young People's Poet Laureate for the 2019–22 terms, and in 2024 received the Wallace Stevens Award and Texas Writer Award.

Early life

Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet and songwriter born in 1952 to a Palestinian father, Aziz Shihab, a journalist, editor, and writer, and American mother, Miriam Allwardt Shihab, an artist who worked as a Montessori school teacher. Her father grew up in Palestine. He and his family became refugees in the 1948 Nakba, when the modern state of Israel was founded. She has said her father "seemed a little shell-shocked when I was a child."

She grew up initially in Ferguson, St. Louis County, Missouri. Her mother studied under Philip Guston and Max Beckmann at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1966, when Nye was 14, the family moved to the West Bank, which was then part of Jordan. After less than a year, before the 1967 Six-Day War occurred, they moved to San Antonio, Texas.

Nye graduated from Robert E. Lee High School, where she was editor of the literary magazine. She earned a BA in English and world religions from Trinity University in 1974 and continued to live and work in San Antonio thereafter.

Career

Teaching

After graduation, Nye worked as a writer-in-schools with the Texas Commission on the Arts. She has continued to teach writing workshops, mostly to children. Currently, she teaches creative writing at Texas State University.

Writing

Nye characterizes herself as a "wandering poet," and says that much of her poetry is inspired by her childhood memories and her travels. She considers San Antonio her current home: "San Antonio feels most like home as I have lived here the longest. But everywhere can be home the moment you unpack, make a tiny space that feels agreeable". San Antonio is the inspiration behind many of her poems.

Nye's first two chapter books, Tattooed Feet (1977) and Eye-to-Eye (1978), are written in free verse and possess themes of questing. Nye's first full-length collection of poems, Different Ways to Pray (1980), explores the differences between and shared experiences of cultures from California to Texas and from South America to Mexico. Hugging the Jukebox (1982), a full-length collection that won the Voertman Poetry Prize, focuses on the connections between diverse peoples and on the perspectives of those in other lands. Her other poetry collections include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, Red Suitcase, and Fuel. Yellow Glove (1986) presents poems with more tragic and sorrowful themes. Other notable books include a collection of essays entitled Never in a Hurry; a young-adult novel called Habibi (the autobiographical story of an Arab-American teenager who moves to Jerusalem in the 1970s) and picture book Lullaby Raft, which is also the title of one of her two albums of music. (The other is called Rutabaga-Roo; both were limited-edition.) According to the Poetry Foundation, Fuel (1998) may be Nye's most acclaimed volume and ranges over a variety of subjects, scenes and settings.

Nye's poem Famous was referenced and quoted in full by Judge Andre Davis in his concurring opinion on the case G. G. v. Gloucester County School Board.

Her poem "So much happiness" was included in the "Happiness" edition of Parabola.

Editing

Nye has edited many anthologies of poems, for audiences both young and old. One of the best-known is This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from around the World, which contains translated work by 129 poets from 68 different countries. Her most recent anthology is called Is This Forever, Or What?: Poems & Paintings from Texas.

Awards and recognition

Nye has won many awards and fellowships, among them four Pushcart Prizes, the Jane Addams Children's Book Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, notable book and best book citations from the American Library Association, and a 2,000 Witter Bynner Fellowship. In 1997, Trinity University, her alma mater, honored her with the Distinguished Alumna Award.

In 1997, Nye became a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry. In 2000, Nye became a Witter Bynner Fellow, awarded by the Library of Congress. In 2002, she became a Lannan Literary Fellow. In June 2009, Nye was named as one of PeaceByPeace.com's first peace heroes. In 2013, Nye won the Robert Creeley Award.

In October 2012, she was named laureate of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature. The NSK Prize is a juried award sponsored by the University of Oklahoma and World Literature Today magazine. In her nominating statement, Ibtisam Barakat, the juror who championed Nye for the award wrote: "Naomi's incandescent humanity and voice can change the world, or someone's world, by taking a position not one word less beautiful than an exquisite poem." Barakat commended her work by saying, "Naomi's poetry masterfully blends music, images, colors, languages, and insights into poems that ache like a shore pacing in ebb and flow, expecting the arrival of meaning."

In 2019, the Poetry Foundation designated Nye their Young People's Poet Laureate for the 2019–21 term. The foundation's announcement characterized Nye's writing style as one that "moves seamlessly between ages in a way that is accessible, warm, and sophisticated even for the youngest of readers."

In 2023, she was awarded an honorary degree from Vermont College of Fine Arts.