The Turtle of Oman & Michigan | Naomi Shihab Nye

Ehkili | Books & Literature from the Arab World

Naomi Shihab Nye talked about her books ‘The Turtle of Oman’ and ‘The Turtle of Michigan. The books are about Aref as he travels from Muscat, Oman, to Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father was a Palestinian refugee and her mother an American of German and Swiss descent, and Nye spent her adolescence in both Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas. She earned her BA from Trinity University in San Antonio. Nye is the recipient of numerous honors and awards for her work, including the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Book Critics Circle, the Lavan Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Carity Randall Prize, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry award, the Robert Creeley Prize, and many Pushcart Prizes. She has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and she was a Witter Bynner Fellow. From 2010 to 2015 she served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018 she was awarded the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters. Nye is the Poetry Foundation's Young People's Poet Laureate.

Created and hosted by Mikey Muhanna

Edited by: Ramzi Ramman

Theme music by: Tarek Yamani https://www.instagram.com/tarek_yamani/

About Book Club:

Book Club is an interview series that calls for afikra community members, who are interested in literature and reading, to spend time reading along with the entire community. Books in Arabic and English will be announced on afikra’s reading list and the members will be asked to do the reading at home at their leisure and then join afikra for a conversation with the authors of those books. Every two weeks, a conversation will be held with an author to discuss their work and the book in particular. Individuals joining the call will be expected to have read the book and prepared questions regarding the context, motivation, and background stories. Following the interview, there is a moderated town-hall-style Q&A with questions coming from the live virtual audience ‎on Zoom.‎ Join the live audience: https://www.afikra.com/rsvp

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afikra is a movement to convert passive interest in the Arab world to active intellectual curiosity. We aim to collectively reframe the dominant narrative of the region by exploring the histories and cultures of the region- past, present, and future - through conversations driven by curiosity.
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