Nathalie Handal

“This cosmopolitan voice belongs to the human family, and it luxuriates in crossing necessary borders. One of the most important voices of her generation.” —Yusef Komunyakaa

“It’s with startling force that Handal builds an architecture for the wanderer.” —Washington Independent Review of Books

“Handal is a brilliant, poetic chronicler of the human condition and a philosopher of the most lyrical reaches.” —Pleiades

“A contemporary Orpheus, she hymns our most urgent and ineffable truths.” —Clare Messud

Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Middle East, and educated in Asia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Poet, playwright, nonfiction and literary travel writer, Handal’s work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Guernica Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, The Irish Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, on PBS and NPR, among others. Handal’s poetry draws on her experiences of dislocation, home, travel, and exile. Critic Catherine Fletcher writes, “While alternating stylistically between the narrative—tinged by the Romantic tradition—and the slightly surreal, much of Handal’s work is also marked by various forms of fragmentation. Within poems from all her collections, she often deconstructs the bodies of her subjects into their parts and houses into their elements: doors, walls, and windows.”

Life in a Country Album (2019) is a soundtrack of the global cultural landscape—borders and citizenship, hybrid identities and home, freedom and pleasure. It’s a vast and moving look at the world, at what home means, and the ways we coexist in an increasingly divided world. “I love how the desire and longing running through these poems reaches me via the collection’s many voices and cityscapes, and—most poignantly—via the borders between bodies, nations and hearts,” says Tracy K. Smith. With this collection, Handal affirms herself as one of our most diverse and important contemporary poets. The flash collection The Republics (2015) is lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers” and is winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the Arab American Book Award. Handal’s recent works include the bestselling bilingual collection La estrella invisible / The Invisible Star (2014); the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía (2012); and Love and Strange Horses (2010), winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award, which The New York Times notes is “a book that trembles with belonging (and longing).”

Handal has promoted international literature through her translation and research. She edited the groundbreaking classic The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology (2001), which was awarded the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award and named one of the top 10 Feminist Books by The Guardian, and co-editor of the landmark anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond (2008) with Tina Chang. Nathalie has worked on over twenty theatrical productions in assorted roles as a playwright, director, or producer. Handal is the author of eight plays: her most recent works have been produced at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Bush Theatre, and at Westminster Abbey in London.

Handal is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, Pen International Croatia Fellow, Centro Andaluz de las Letras Fellow, Fondazione di Venezia Fellow, winner of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature, and Honored Finalist for the Gift of Freedom Award. In 2017, she was included as one of the 100 Outstanding Contributors to their Fields exhibition, inaugurated in the United Nations in New York and Geneva. She is a professor at Columbia University, and a Visiting Writer at the American University of Rome. She writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words without Borders and resides in New York City.

Short Bio

Poet, playwright, nonfiction and literary travel writer, Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Middle East, and educated in Asia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Her poetry collections are Life in a Country Album, The Republics, Poet in Andalucía, and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award. She is the author of eight plays and editor of two anthologies including the groundbreaking classic The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award. She writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words without Borders and resides in New York City. She is a professor at Columbia University, and a Visiting Writer at the American University of Rome.

Read What’s In Print

• A Queens Poet Without Borders – The Wall Street Journal

• Crucifixion: Nathalie Handal on being Palestinian, writing and enduring love — The Guardian

• Multimedia: Postcards from Kabul — BOMB

Listen to Audio

• Listen to “Dor”— American Academy of Poetry

• Listen to “Prophet in Andalusia”— World Literature Today

• Read “My East in Venice: piecing together a fragmented Palestinian family”— Guernica

• Read “Les Éventails, Portraits of Passion”— Poetry Foundation

THE UNNATURAL APOLOGIE OF SHADOWS

We say lightning has no wings
when it slides down our houses

We say loss is just a condition
we acquire to bury our pity further

We say the bleeding hands
on the table filled with red wine
imported products and passports
are just reminders of
who we have become

We have no titles no birthright
no groves or Shakespeare
to return to

We apologize for the fear
growing out of our ribs

Apologize for the numbers
still etched on our tongues

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