Birth: NULL/NULL/1952 Death:NULL/NULL/NULL
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, on 12 March 1952 to an American mother and a Palestinian father from Jerusalem, Aziz Shihab; moved to Jerusalem at the age of 14; attended the St. Tarkmanchatz Armenian School in the Old City of Jerusalem in 1966-67; returned with her family to the US, settling in San Antonio, Texas; received a BA from Trinity University in 1974; works as freelance writer, editor, and poet; is a regular columnist for Organica and poetry editor for The Texas Observer; has received numerous prizes and honors, incl., among others, the Texas Institute of Letters Prize, a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets (1988), four Pushcart Prizes, two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards, the Charity Randall Prize for Spoken Poetry (International Poetry Forum, Pittsburgh), the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for 2005; has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Wittner Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress); her works include: Different Ways to Pray (1980), Huggling the Jukebox (one of the American Library Associations Notable Books for 1982), Red Suitcase (1994), Never in a Hurry: Essays on People and Places (1996), Fuel (1998), The Space Between Our Footsteps (1998), 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (Greenwillow Books, 2002), and You and Yours (2005); novel for teenagers Habibi (1999) and Going, Going (2005), and kids books Sitti’s Secrets (1997), Salting the Ocean (2000), and Baby Radar (2003); has also translated some literary works from Arabic into English.
