Western Asia

Farah Chamma (she/her) is a Palestinian poet and performer. As a performer, Chamma has participated in many events and festivals, including Palestine en Campagne (France), Wilde Möhre (Germany), Bradford Literature...

Forugh Farrokhzad was an Iranian poet, a screenwriter, a painter, and a filmmaker. She was born in Mazandaran, north of Tehran, to a large family, and is one of Iran’s preeminent mid-20th-century writers. ...

Joyce Mansour was an Egyptian-French author and part of the inner circle of postwar surrealists. She wrote 16 books of poetry as well as prose works and plays. Mansour was born in Bowden, England, to Jewish...

Shara Lessley was born and raised in central California. She is the author of The Explosive Expert’s Wife (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), winner of the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize for best collection...

Tarik Dobbs is a writer, an artist, and a 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. Their poems appear in the Best New Poets and Best of the Net anthologies as well as in Guernica and in...

Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian is the author of six poetry collections: Lean Against this Late Hour (2020), Acceptance (2015), Hollows (2011), Lines Change Places in the Dark (2008), The Faded Colors of...

Abu Nuwas (Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn Hani al-Hakami) was born around 760 in southwestern Persia, now a borderland between Iran and Iraq. He studied in Basra under the mentorship of the poets Abu Usama Waliba ibn...

Rachel Tzvia Back (she/her) is the author of the poetry collections Azimuth (Sheep Meadow Press, 2001), The Buffalo Poems (Duration Press, 2002), On Ruins & Return: Poems 1999–2005 (Shearsman Books, 2007),...

Miri Ben-Simhon was born in Marseille to Moroccan parents en route to Israel. She grew up and lived in Jerusalem throughout her life, studying Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem after ...

Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi was born Jalal al-Din Mohammad-e Balkhi on the edge of the Persian Empire, in Balkh in modern-day Afghanistan (though another birthplace in Tajikistan is also claimed). The son...

Nazim Hikmet Ran was born in Salonika, now Thessaloníki, Greece. His father worked in the Foreign Service for the Ottoman Empire; his mother was an artist and his grandfather was a poet. Hikmet left Turkey...

Amjad Nasser was born in al-Turra, Jordan, and worked as a journalist in both Beirut and Cyprus. A major force in contemporary Arab writing, he published numerous collections of poetry, travel writing, and...

Dr. Yasmine Shamma (she/her) is a writer, an editor, and a professor of literature at the University of Hull. She is the author of Spatial Poetics: Second Generation New York School Poetry (Oxford University...

Bejan Matur is a Turkish poet, author, and columnist. She was born in Pazarcık, the district of Kahramanmaraş, in 1968. She earned a law degree from Ankara University Faculty of Law. Her most recent book is...

Poet and philosopher Mikhail Naimy was born in Lebanon in 1889. He lived in Palestine as a child and attended the Theological Seminary in Poltava, the Ukraine, from 1906 to 1911. In 1911 he moved to the United...

Born near Bethlehem, Palestinian poet, novelist, and editor Ghassan Zaqtan has lived in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Tunisia. A poet who writes primarily in Arabic, Zaqtan is the author of numerous collections...

SAID is a native of Iran and has lived in Germany since 1965. He has published eight volumes of poetry, as well as several collections of essays, children’s books, and radio plays. Titles appearing in English...

Iraqi American poet Dunya Mikhail is the author of numerous poetry collections: The War Works Hard (New Directions, 2005), translated from the Arabic by Elizabeth Winslow, won a PEN Translation Fund Grant,...

Though he considered himself to be mainly a painter, lived most of his life in the United States, and wrote his best-known works in English, Kahlil Gibran was the key figure in a Romantic movement that transformed...

Palestinian poet and short story writer Taha Muhammad Ali grew up in Saffuriya, Galilee. During the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, he moved with his family to Lebanon for a year. Self-taught through his readings...