Poets Naomi Shihab Nye, Michael Simms, & Friends. Presented with Vox Populi

This is a virtual-only event streamed on City of Asylum’s virtual platform, City of Asylum @ Home.
Run time: 90 minutes

Naomi Shihab Nye, the current Young People’s Poet Laureate, and poet Michael Simms gather international poets to share works that navigate themes of identity, displacement, and home in Gaza.

About the poets:

Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet, songwriter, and novelist, and is theYoung People’s Poet Laureate through the Poetry Foundation, has recently published Everything Comes Next, The Tiny Journalist, Cast Away, and Voices in the Air – Poems for Listeners.

Michael Simms’s most recent book of poetry is American Ash. As the founding editor of Vox Populi and the founding editor emeritus of Autumn House Press and Coal Hill Review, Simms was recognized in 2011 by the Pennsylvania State Legislature for his contribution to the arts.

Philip Metres is a poet, professor, and author of Shrapnel Maps and Sand Opera, among other books, has recently been working with We Are Not Numbers, an organization dedicated to mentoring Palestinian youth from Gaza as they write their stories for English-reading audiences.

Zeina Azzam is a Palestinian American poet, writer, editor, and community activist, whose chapbook Bayna Bayna In-Between was published in 2021.

Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, fiction writer, essayist from Gaza, is the Founder of the Edward Said Public Library in Gaza and was a visiting poet/scholar at Harvard in 2019-2020.

Californian Danusha Laméris is the author of The Moons of August (Autumn House Press, 2014), and Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), teaches poetry independently, and is on the faculty of Pacific University’s low residency MFA program.

Kathy Engel, poet & cultural worker, teaches in Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, recently published The Lost Brother Alphabet, and, in 2007, co-edited with Kamal Boullata, We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her first book of poems, WATER & SALT, won the 2018 Washington State Book Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Arab in Newsland, winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Prize and Letters from the Interior, finalist for the 2020 Jean Pedrick Award.

The son of Arab immigrants, born in Detroit, Hayan Charara is a poet, children’s book author, essayist and editor who lives in Houston.

Nour Al Ghraowi, a Syrian writer, activist, and educator, writes about social justice, and migrant identity with works appearing in Poetry magazine and others.