BIO Hassan Al-Matrooshi is an award-winning poet, translator, and media-man from the Sultanate of Oman. He was awarded the Sultan’s Praise Medal, and honored as the Omani poet for 2016. Hasan has published four Arabic poetry collections: Lonely.. Like My Father’s Grave (2003), On The Same Mountainside (2008), I Have What To Forget (2013). and…
Farouk Banjar
BIO Farouk Banjar is a Saudi poet, writer and educator. He was born in the holy city of Makka in 1949. He has a bachelor’s degree in Arabic Language literature and a master’s degree in Education Management from the University of Oklahoma in the US. In 1998 he made his debut with a collection of…
Amal Awwad Radwan
BIO Amal Awwad Radwan is a Palestinian poet, musician, writer, essayist, journalist, educator and social activist. She was born in the town of I’billin in the north of Palestine. She made her debut in 20005 with a poetry book titled An Almondy Flower Glowing. Since then she has published four poetry collections and seven…
Abdulla Issa
BIO Abdulla Issa is an award-winning Palestinian poet, academic, translator, journalist, political analyst, and film producer living in Moscow. He was born in 1964 in the refugee camp of Bebela, near Damascus, Syria, where his parents had migrated, following the 1948 Palestinian Nakba. Abdulla graduated from The Maxim Gorky Institute of Literature and Creative Writing. He received his PhD from…
Building Bridges and Connecting Cultures: An Interview with Nizar Sartawi, by Kalpna Singh-Chitnis
In times like these, when the world leaders are bent on building walls between the nations and cultures, and people are more inclined to see their differences from others rather than their commonalities, there are some people who have dedicated themselves to building bridges by transcending the barriers of languages, ideologies and national identities, and…
Nizar Sartawi
Nizar Sartawi is a poet, translator, essayist, and columnist. He was born in Sarta, Palestine, in 1951. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the University of Jordan, Amman, and a Master’s degree in Human Resources Development from the University of Minnesota, U.S. Sartawi is a member of the Jordanian Writers Association, General…
Amy Small-McKinney
BIO Amy Small-McKinney won The Kithara Book Prize 2016 (Glass Lyre Press) for her second full-length collection of poems, Walking Toward Cranes. She is also the author of, Life is Perfect (BookArts Press, 2014) and two chapbooks of poetry, Body of Surrender (2004) and Clear Moon, Frost (2009), both with Finishing Line Press. Small-McKinney…
Being Reborn: An Immigrant’s Story
Being Reborn: An Immigrant’s Story ..by Yahia Lababidi It was the end of the affair. Born and raised in Cairo, Egypt I came to realize, at the age 32, that I could not live, love and create there, any longer. I required new air and it was, finally, time to dare and take a leap……
Michael J. Whelan
BIO Michael J. Whelan is an Irish soldier-poet & historian. He served as UN Peacekeeper in Lebanon and Kosovo in the early 1990s. 2nd in the Patrick Kavanagh and 3rd in the Jonathon Swift Creative Writing Awards and selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions, Michael’s Debut collection PEACEKEEPER was published in 2016 by Doire Press. More…
Deema Shehabi
BIO Deema K Shehabi is a poet, writer, and editor. The daughter of Palestinian parents, she grew up in the Arab world and moved to the United States in 1988. Her poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies such as The Kenyon Review, Literary Imagination, New Letters, Callaloo, Massachusetts Review, Perihelion, Drunken Boat,…
Armine Iknadossian
BIO Beirut-born, Southern California-raised Armine Iknadossian is the author of United States of Love & Other Poems (2016). She has been published in Margie, Pearl, Rhino, Split This Rock, Alabama Literary Review, The Nervous Breakdown and elsewhere. Armine has an MFA in Poetry from Antioch and has worked as a teacher, as assistant editor to Arianna Huffington, Robert Scheer and Molly…
For Adelle: A Tribute by Jack Foley
The one who looked after me has gone The one I looked after has gone —Bertolt Brecht . How do you mourn the absence of someone you’ve seen almost every day of your life and whose daily presence was always a comfort to you? We’ve all seen children in the midst of what seems to…