Nathalie Handal
Nathalie Handal was born in Haiti to a Levantine family and raised in Latin America, North America, Europe, and the Arab world. She received an MFA from Bennington College and an MPhil in drama and English from the University of London.
Handal is the author of ten books of poetry, translated into more than fifteen languages, including Volo (Diode Editions, 2023); Life in a Country Album (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), winner of the Palestine Book Award; the “flash reportage” poetry collection The Republics (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), lauded by Patricia Smith as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers,” and winner of both the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the 2016 Arab American Book Award; Poet in Andalucia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); and Love and Strange Horses (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), which received a Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award.
About Handal’s work, Yusef Komunyakaa writes, “This cosmopolitan voice belongs to the human family, and it luxuriates in crossing necessary borders.”
Handal is the editor of The Poetry of Arab Women (Interlink Books, 2001), winner of the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, and, with Tina Chang, the coeditor of Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (W. W. Norton, 2008). Also a playwright, Handal has worked on more than twenty theatrical productions, produced at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Westminster Abbey, and elsewhere.
Handal has also been the recipient of awards from the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Fondazione di Venezia, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, and Africa Institute. She was featured at the United Nations for outstanding contributors in literature. Additionally, she has been awarded the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature.
Handal has taught at Columbia University and in the low-residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada College. She is currently a professor of literature and creative writing at New York University–Abu Dhabi, and writes the literary travel column “The City and the Writer” for Words Without Borders’ online magazine. In September 2025, for National Translation Month, she will serve as Guest Editor of Poem-a-Day. Handal currently lives in New York City, Rome, and Abu Dhabi.