Naomi Shihab Nye

Palestinian-American writer, editor and educator Naomi Shihab Nye is Young People’s Poet Laureate of the United States (Poetry Foundation). She grew up in Ferguson, Missouri, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she continues to live. Her late father Aziz Shihab was a journalist and author of Does the Land Remember Me? A Memoir of Palestine. She has been a visiting writer in hundreds of schools and communities all over the world for more than 40 years, and has written or edited 35 books including collections of poetry, novels for teens, picture books, essays, short stories, and anthologies of poetry. Her books Sitti’s Secrets, Habibi, This Same Sky, and The Tree is Older than You Are: Poems & Paintings from Mexico have been in print more than 20 years. Her volume 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, was a finalist for the National Book Award. The Turtle of Oman (Greenwillow) a novel for children set in Muscat, won the Arab American Book Award. Her most recent books are Voices in the Air, The Tiny Journalist, Cast Away, and Everything Comes Next.