Naomi Shihab Nye Headshot

Naomi Shihab Nye

Literary Arts, San Antonio

Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, moved to Jerusalem (her Palestinian father’s home city) as a teen, and has lived many years in old downtown San Antonio, Texas, with her husband, photographer Michael Nye, and their son. Her parents Miriam and Aziz Shihab (a journalist retired from The Dallas Morning News) have lived for many years in Dallas, and her brother, Adlai Shihab, in Plano. Her husband grew up in Corpus Christi.

 

A poet, essayist, and writer of novels and short stories for teens, she was a National Book Finalist for 19 Varieties of Gazelle. Other collections of poetry include Words Under the Words, Red Suitcase, Fuel, Come with Me: Poems for a Journal, and A Maze Me. She has edited seven prize-winning anthologies of poetry for young readers, most recently Is This Forever or What? Poems and Paintings from Texas (2004). Since graduating from Trinity University, she has conducted writing workshops and given readings and talks in hundreds of schools worldwide, originally working through the Texas Commission on the Arts.

 

Nye has been a Lannon Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Witter Bynner Fellow (through The Library of Congress). She has worked three times as visiting instructor through the Michener Center for Writers in Austin and taught two classes in Spring 2005. For many years she has been the poetry editor of The Texas Observer and is a regular columnist for Organica.