Khaled Mattawa was born in Benghazi, Libya, in 1964 and immigrated to the United States in 1979. He received an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University and a Ph.D from Duke University. Mattawa is the author of four books of poetry,Tocqueville (New Issues Press, 2010), which won the San Francisco Poetry Center Prize and the Arab American National Book Award for Poetry; Amorisco (Ausable Press, 2008), Zodiac of Echoes (Ausable Press, 2003) and Ismailia Eclipse (Sheep Meadow Press, 1996). He has translated nine books of contemporary Arabic poetry by Adonis, Saadi Youssef, Fadhil Al-Azzawi, Hatif Janabi, Maram Al-Massri, Joumana Haddad, Amjad Nasser, and Iman Mersal, and has co-edited two anthologies of Arab American literature. Mattawa’s translation of Adonis’s Selected Poems won the PEN USA Center annual Poetry in Translation prize. Mattawa’s awards include the 2010 Academy of American Poets Fellowship Prize, a Ford/United States
Khaled Mattawa
Articles by Khaled Mattawa
Tuesday January 17
Among the Splendors
As I read more of Adonis’s work over the years, in the original and in translation, I felt repeatedly that only a large of selection of work could give a sense of the myriad stylistic transformations that he had brought to modern poetry at large, through his esthetic renderings of the cultural dilemmas confronting Arab societies in particular.