We Are Family

Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father was a Palestinian refugee and her mother an American of German and Swiss descent, and she spent her adolescence in both Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas. She earned her BA from Trinity University in San Antonio. Naomi Shihab Nye is the recipient of numerous honors and awards for her work, including the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Book Critics Circle, the Lavan Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Carity Randall Prize, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry award, the Robert Creeley Prize, and many Pushcart Prizes.

She has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and she was a Witter Bynner Fellow. From 2010 to 2015 she served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018 she was awarded the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters. Naomi Shihab Nye is the current Young People’s Poet Laureate (Poetry Foundation). She is the author and/or editor of more than 30 volumes. Her books of poetry include Everything Comes Next: Collected & New Poems, Cast Away: Poems for Our Time, Voices in the Air, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, A Maze Me: Poems for Girls, Red Suitcase, Words Under the Words, Fuel, and You & Yours (a bestselling poetry book of 2006). Her middle-grade novel, The Turtle of Oman, was chosen as both a Best Book of 2014 by the Horn Book and a 2015 Notable Children’s Book by the American Library Association. Naomi Shihab Nye lives in San Antonio, Texas.