Khaled Mattawa

Profile

Khaled Mattawa was born in Benghazi, Libya, in 1964 and immigrated to the United States in his teens. He is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Fugitive Atlas (Graywolf Press, 2020), and a critical study, Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet’s Art and His Nation (Syracuse University Press, 2014). Mattawa has also translated many volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry and coedited two anthologies of Arab American literature.

Mattawa is the 2010 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the PEN American Center Poetry Translation Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, and a MacArthur Fellowship. A Chancellor Emeritus (2014-2020) of the Academy of American Poets, Mattawa is the William Wilhartz Endowed Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where he directs the Arab and Muslim American Studies Program and edits Michigan Quarterly Review.