Khaled Mattawa

1964 –
Read poems by this poet

Khaled Mattawa was born in Benghazi, Libya, in 1964 and immigrated to the United States in his teens. Mattawa received a BA in political science and economics from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga before earning an MA in English and an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University, as well as a PhD from Duke University in 2009.

Mattawa’s collections of poetry include Fugitive Atlas (Graywolf Press, 2020); Tocqueville (New Issues, 2010); Amorisco (Ausable, 2008); Zodiac of Echoes (Ausable, 2003); and Ismailia Eclipse (Sheep Meadow Press, 1995). He is also the author of the critical work Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet’s Art and His Nation (Syracuse University Press, 2014).

Mattawa has translated many volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry and coedited two anthologies of Arab American literature. His many books of translation include Adonis: Selected Poems (Yale University Press, 2010); Invitation to a Secret Feast (Tupelo Press, 2008) by Joumana Haddad; A Red Cherry on A White-Tile Floor (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) by Maram Al-Massri; Miracle Maker, Selected Poems of Fadhil Al-Azzawi (BOA Editions, 2004); and Without An Alphabet, Without A Face: Selected Poems of Saadi Youssef (Graywolf Press, 2002).

The poet Yusef Komunyakaa has described Mattawa’s work as “novelistic in its reach and depth.” The poet Marilyn Hacker writes that his writing “is politically astute, formally daring, grips the reader with an intelligence that spotlights, too, its sensual and emotional (and historical) accuracy.”

Mattawa is the 2010 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. He has received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the PEN American Center Poetry Translation Prize, three Pushcart Prizes, and a MacArthur Fellowship.

A former Academy Chancellor (2013–18), Mattawa is a professor in the department of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In December 2025, he will serve as a Guest Editor of Poem-a-Day.