In 2025, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Khaled Mattawa discusses his curatorial approach and his own creative work.
Poets.org: Welcome to the Guest Editor Q&A, hosted by the Academy of American Poets. I’m Mary Sutton, editorial director at the Academy, and I’m here today with our Guest Editor for December, Khaled Mattawa. Khaled is a former Chancellor of the Academy and the author of Fugitive Atlas. Khaled, welcome, and thank you so much for joining me today.
Khaled Mattawa: Thank you for doing this interview and for all your hard work with the curation, for your persistence and patience with me, I truly appreciate it. And for inviting me to do this. Thank you.
Poets.org: Thank you as well. Let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for the month of December?
Mattawa: Among the many things I love about the website and the project itself is the way that it introduces us to poets. Sometimes new poets, sometimes poets who’ve been working for a long time and we hadn’t heard from in a while. So that’s kind of the approach I took. I went through the list and of the five years of curation, and I wanted to make sure that everyone, if not almost everyone that I chose, had not been represented in the last five years. So I was keen on providing opportunities for people whom the audience of the Academy or Poem-a-Day hadn’t seen for a while or maybe not at all. And then I also began to think somewhat strategically, but also with a sense of gratitude. I’m very grateful to many of my teachers and some of them I saw had not been represented. And some other teachers that I saw were not represented, so I wanted to make sure that I pay homage to them and thank them and publish great poems that I’ve written.
Another aspect is, I also was thinking of my students. Because if my teachers were, if you will, my poetic parents, if you will, by now, I have grandchildren. Poets who studied with my students are publishing works and books now. [laughs] That’s how long I’ve been in the business, if you will. So I wanted to at least catch some of my students, or some of them just had books and some of them are just kind of beginning publishing and putting a good record [sic]. It was hard to choose among them, but I just chose some that I thought should receive some recognition. And then there were other poets that I’ve admired and published in MQR, Michigan Quarterly Review. That’s the magazine I added whose work I wanted to see. So overall, the basic element is to have poets who had not been in [in] a while, at least in the last five years. And also poets that I feel should be represented. So essentially I took the track of former teachers, students, and other poets that I felt are doing good work and are not receiving the attention or recognition that they should receive.
Poets.org: Now, if you could direct our readers and listeners to one poem on Poets.org that you haven’t curated, what would it be and why?
Mattawa: That poem will have to be, for now at least, “First Dream” by C. S. Giscombe, who teaches at UC Berkeley, and a poet that I admire. He’s somebody that I wanted to be in my curation, but he didn’t answer right away or at least answered late. And by the time he got back to me, it was a little too late to include him. So he’s somebody who would’ve fallen into the same group of people, a poet for the full career who should be read more. And “First Dream,” which is on the website, is a deceptively complicated poem in a way that dreams are deceptively, or they seem easy but are complicated. This [is] a narrative, it has this kind of story in it, but then it weaves many other elements. And it picks up on issues of social tension and so on. And it just does it with this real great facility and ease that is kind of really gripping. So that’s a poem that I’d like people to read, and I do it as a way of telling C. S. Giscombe that he’s kind of included by proxy, if you will [laughs], by having his poem being mentioned as part of the curation, even though he’s not.
Poets.org: Sure. Now, there’s one poem of yours that is not on Poets.org in the curation that we have from you, though I like it very much. And the title of that poem is “Malouk’s Qassida,” a poem from your 2019 collection, Mare Nostrum, a title that refers to the nickname in Latin for the Mediterranean, “our sea,” a name that was used particularly during the Italian fascist era, but maybe even much sooner during Italy’s colonization of North and East Africa, which started much earlier. So the poem is interesting to me because it’s narrated from the perspective of a migrant arriving in Lampedusa, a tiny island between Sicily and North Africa. The poem, in my reading of it, is mysterious in that it’s written as an ode, right? Qassida means “ode.” But it depicts the narrator’s disorientation after a long sea journey. It then ends with the question, “Who is saving whom?” Which I think is so poignant because it rejects this narrative, this predominant narrative, of migrants being a burden on Western societies because those societies depend so much on migrants in so many ways. So Mare Nostrum is a chapbook, and the poems in this chapbook—
Mattawa: The poem is also in Fugitive Atlas. The chapbook is like the little dolphin inside the mama dolphin.
Poets.org: [laughs] Okay. That’s a nice way of putting that.
Mattawa: Again with the maritime imagery. [laughs]
Poets.org: But in the chapbook, the poems are interconnected and tell a story. There’s also a really great section of allams in there based on Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage,” which I deeply appreciated. I would love for you to tell us a little bit more about your decision to write that chapbook, and how you think the story you tell therein connects to the issue of immigration in the United States today.
Mattawa: Well, the Malouk poem, there are two poems. One is an ode, which is longer. The word ode, I try to make a distinction between the word ode is [sic] English and maybe Latin or has Latin roots. The qasida is an Arabic poem. It’s the word for a poem in Arabic nowadays, but originally it’s a word for a long poem that has monorhyme, that has the same rhyme carrying through with it. And that was the tradition that stayed. So the qasida, “Malouk’s Qassida,” is a short one that has a monorhyme that follow[s], but the ode does not. So I wanted to just make a distinction between those two. The qasida with the line, “Who’s saving whom?” And the question is never answered but implied, or I forget the phrasing of my own poem, comes really from the question about immigrants. I mean, Italy now is kind of depopulating. There are more people dying in Italy than there are being born. Same thing in China. The U.S. is nearing that situation. That’s why we hear in some corners that we need more babies and so on.
And every society in the past, or at least in a modern era, and we in America did that too, is when we needed people to work, to contribute to the economy, to contribute to society, and to have children who ultimately end up fighting our wars, we’ve had immigrants come in and that’s what the nineteenth and twentieth centur[ies] have been. So now we have this fear of immigrants, which is ultimately a kind of racial fear, unfortunately. So that’s the context of America and Europe. But, you know, because I’m from Libya, and I go back and it’s my native land, the issue of migration is a big one because people are leaving from the Libyan shores. Libya is this middle place within this really hellish saga, and they experience being held by traffickers and extorted and being asked to pay more money under threat, enslaved in many cases. And it’s a really sad and unfortunate story.
And so my part of that is that I wanted to tell that story with Libya being a kind of a central place, but I take the journey from a deeper place in Africa, and even from, I also addressed the part of the migration that came from Turkey through Greece and so on. I wanted to tell all of that story with the positionality that, first of all, I’m a citizen of the first world, but I’m also a citizen of Libya where these folks are being tormented. But also, the torment is part of a larger cycle. It is horrible to see your people being caught up in a vicious economic cycle. And now also you are seeing them as being employed to almost become the traffickers and also the enforcers of the European policy. So you have people in Libya who are holding people in bins and keeping them until they hit the sea, and then there are others, or sometimes the same people, capture them from the sea and bring them back to Libya in order for the vicious cycle to continue.
So all of that was just a horrendous legacy to be a kind of witness to, and to know that you, as a first-world citizen, are part of the system that’s not allowing people to migrate. And as a part of a middle country or middle nation such as Libya, to think that some of your citizenry, first of all, are participating in this. And also, are really following terrible policies at the dictates of Europe in order to make life very difficult for the migrants. There are so many things that I couldn’t get into in the poems. So it’s, if you will, a double burden that I felt as a human conscience that I wanted to tell the story and follow the story and capture these voices, if you will, or at least give voice if that’s possible. Malouk, as a name or as a character, comes from a novel called African Titanics by the Eritrean novelist, Abu Bakr Khaal, who actually had lived in Libya for a while and began to write in Arabic in Libya.
And so, in some ways, it’s maybe one of the positive aspects of that story is that an Eritrean intellectual comes and lives as a refugee and ends up writing a novel in the language of your home country of Libya. So that’s one side of the story. But the character was intriguing for me. He was a Nigerian character in a novel by an Eritrean. So there is a lot of intersectionality there, and, if you will, a lot of empathy and dramatic invention. Both by Abu Bakr Khaal and his novel, and maybe on myself extending on that by extending Malouk’s voice and his story. But ultimately it was a travesty that has not been part of the American conscience or even conscience of the English language. But that’s my tool, and that’s the story that I saw, and I felt I needed to bring attention to it.
Poets.org: And what are you reading right now?
Mattawa: Right now, the book of poetry that I just finished reading is Names by Marilyn Hacker. And it floored me: her mastery, her use of formal poetry and form, her diction. She’s a friend, and I should email her before she sees this, but maybe if she sees it, she’ll know that I’ve told the whole world how much I love that book. So that’s the last book I’ve read. But I read in a very scattered manner. I’m like a squirrel. I put all books all over the yard and read from here and there and forget what I‘m reading often. [laughs] But I know that when I sat with it for four hours or so, reading it out loud to myself and really enjoying it, that’s a wonderful experience.
Poets.org: And what are you working on now in your writing, teaching, and publishing life?
Mattawa: I am always, again, this is the other metaphor, which is the
short-order cook, but cooking really for hundreds of people at the same time. So I’m working on a book of poems that I found, it just kind of lunged at me, and I just couldn’t stop working on it. And it’s almost like I had skipped over the two other books that I had been working on. And I’m finishing up a translation of the late Iraqi poet, Saadi Youssef, who I’ve already done a book with or of, but these are his last decade of writings. He died in 2021. And assembling an anthology of writings from Gaza. So there are a lot of them, but this one is maybe a bigger and more, I don’t know, larger in size and perhaps ... Any Arabic, that one is not translated for English just yet. So there are other things that I’m working on that I can’t remember at the moment. [laughs]
Poets.org: Because you’re a short-order cook. Too many things.
Mattawa: Exactly. [laughs] You have the omelet? [laughs]
Poets.org: Well, I’m glad we were able to get this interview off your plate [laughs], so now you have fewer things to do—
Mattawa: Yes, thank you.
Poets.org: ... as you come to the close of the year. But I deeply appreciated this time with you and especially all of your metaphors. I think our audience will too.
Mattawa: Absolutely, that’s what I work with. Yeah. Thanks so much, Mary. I really appreciate your hard work and professionalism, you’re a gem.
Poets.org: Thank you so much, Khaled.