Birth: NULL/NULL/1936 Death:NULL/NULL/1977
Born in Musmus, near Umm Al-Fahm, in 1936; wrote his first poetry while still a pupil; published a small collection of poetry, Ma’a al-Fajr (At Dawn) in Nazareth in 1957 and some of his poems were published in a thin volume compiled by the Nazarene poet Michel Haddad under the title A Variety of Arabic Poetry in Israel a year later; much of his poetry dealt with national issues such as the tragedy of the Palestinian refugees, life under Israel’s military government, and land appropriations; worked as a school teacher in Nazareth; was arrested for spreading his progressive ideas in 1958; was employed by MAPAM (The United Workers Party) as an editor of its Arabic-language literary journal, Al-Fajr, in Tel Aviv; was also involved in Israeli-Arab dialogue among journalists and intellectuals in the late 1950s; moved to Paris in 1965, then to New York in 1967, where he worked as Hebrew-Arabic translator for the PLO and the Arab League; moved to Syria in 1971 and established the Palestinian Studies Association in addition to preparing Hebrew news for the Syrian Radio; serves as correspondent of the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation in New York in the 1970s; later became correspondent for the Palestinian delegation to the UN in New York, where he died after a mysterious fire incident in his room; published poetry collections, incl. Sawarikh (Missiles) (Arabic, 1958), Palestinian Poems (Arabic, 1982), and translated some works from Hebrew into Arabic, for instance a book on Israeli poet Chaim Nahman Bialik (1966); was buried in Musmus on 8 Feb. 1977; some of his writings were published in 1979 in the volume The World of Rashid Hussein A Palestinian Poet in Exile (edited by Kamal Boullata, Detroit: Association of Arab-American University Graduates, 1979).
