Khaled
Mattawa
Poet and Translator Ann Arbor, MI
2010 USA Fellow
This award was generously supported by the Ford Foundation.
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Born and raised in Benghazi, Libya, poet Khaled Mattawa relocated to the United States as a teenager in 1979. Mattawa earned a BA in political science and economics from the University of Tennessee, an MA and an MFA from Indiana University, and a PhD from Duke University.
He has published several collections of poetry, including Tocqueville (2010), Amorisco (2008), Zodiac of Echoes (2003), and Ismailia Eclipse (1995). He has translated numerous volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry, including Adonis’s Concerto al-Quds (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (2017), Shepherd of Solitude: Selected Poems of Amjad Nasser (2009), and Miracle Maker: Selected Poems of Fadhil Al-Azzawi (2004), in addition to coediting the anthologies Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Arab American Fiction (2004) and Post Gibran: Anthology of New Arab American Writing (1999). His own work has been widely anthologized as well.
He has been awarded several Pushcart Prizes and the PEN Award for Literary Translation, in addition to a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and a MacArthur fellowship.
The editor of Michigan Quarterly Review, Mattawa has taught at Indiana University; California State University, Northridge; and the University of Michigan.
Portrait photo courtesy artist.