Nathalie Handal

Nathalie Handal is an award-winning French-American poet and writer of Middle Eastern descent. She was raised in Latin America, France and the Middle East, and educated in Asia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Claire Messud writes that she is “a contemporary Orpheus.” Of her recently published collection Life in a Country Album (2019), Tracy K. Smith writes, “I love how the desire and longing running through these poems reaches me via the collection’s many voices and cityscapes, and--most poignantly—via the borders between bodies, nations and hearts. Absolutely gorgeous.” Some of her other books include the flash collection The Republics, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers” and winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the Arab American Book Award; the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía; and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award, which The New York Times said is “a book that trembles with belonging (and longing).” She is a professor at Columbia University, and writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words without Borders.