Khaled Mattawa

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