About the Writers

CURRENT 2009-2010 SEASON

Khaled Mattawa

Khaled Mattawa was born in 1964 in Benghazi, Libya. He immigrated to the U.S. in his teens. Author of Ismailia Eclipse (1995), Zodiac of Echoes (2003), and Amorisco (2008), he has translated numerous publications and has served as an editor for volumes of contemporary Arabic writing including Post-Gibran Anthology of New Arab American Writing (1999), Dinarzad's Children: an anthology of contemporary Arab American fiction (2004) and Invitation to a Secret Feast (2008). Among his accolades are a Guggenheim fellowship, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA translation grant. Mattawa teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Links to other texts about Khaled Mattawa

Interview

On November 27, 2007, Jeff Lodge and Patty Paine spoke with Khaled Mattawa, on Virginia Commonwealth University's Qatar campus, about his work as a writer and translator.

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Salah D. Hassan interviewed Khaled Mattawa for the publication Melus.

Mattawa's poetry expresses a deep commitment to exposing the tangled and often knotted relationships between language, time, place, and memory. While he draws regularly on material from the Arab world, his poems are not limited by any particular national sentiment. Rather his writing is evocative of the difficult negotiation of attachment and distance produced out of filial ties to the Arabic language and Arab places that can only be approximated through writing in English. This interview, conducted over e-mail in spring 2005, raises issues in connection with Mattawa's work generally, but focuses specifically on his continuing ties to Arab world contexts.

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