Symposium
& Festival: "The World Republic of Literature"
Lannan Symposium,
April 11-12, 2006
Gonda Theatre, Georgetown University
Nathalie Handal
Nathalie Handal is a poet, writer, playwright, director and producer. She has lived in the Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Arab world. She finished her postgraduate studies in English and Drama at University of London, United Kingdom, her MFA in Creative Writing and Literature at Bennington College, Vermont, her Master of Arts in English and her Bachelor of Arts in International Relations and Communications at Simmons College, Boston. Handal studied play writing, fiction writing and poetry with many distinguished authors, namely, Edward Allan Baker, Arthur Giron, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Lucille Clifton and Howard Norman.
She has read/performed, lectured and taught theatre and creative writing workshops worldwide, namely at La Sorbonne, University of London, McGill University, City University of New York, Yarmouk University, University of Jordan, Lewis and Clark, Arvon Foundation, UK and at numerous other universities, festivals and conferences. She was one of the Chairs at the Pushkin Club, London (Russian Literary Center) and the Program Director of Summer Literary Seminars in the Dominican Republic.
Her work has appeared in numerous magazines/literary reviews, has been translated into various languages (French, Spanish, Serbo-Croatian, Albanian, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Malayan) and she has been featured on NPR, KPFK, and PBS Radio. Handal has been involved either as a writer, director or producer in over twenty productions worldwide, most recently, her play, Between Our Lips, premiered the Blue Heron Theatre in New York and The Details of Silence at Symphony Space, NY. She has also directed several plays, namely, Grenade by Yussef El Guindi and Hi! Joan by Maysoon Zayid. Handal is the author of Traveling Rooms (Poetry CD-improvisational music by Russian musicians, Vladimir Miller and Alexandr Alexandrov, ASC Records, UK), The NeverField (poetry book), and most recently the poetry CD, Spell (music by Egyptian musician Will Solimon) and The Lives of Rain, Shortlisted for The Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize/The Pitt Poetry Series.
She is the editor of The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, an Academy of American Poets Bestseller and Winner of the Pen Oakland/Josephine Miles Award and is currently finishing, Arab-American and Arab Anglophone Literature, forthcoming 2006. Handal is Poetry Books Review Editor for Sable (UK), a member of Nibras Theatre Collective and Associate Artist and Development Executive for the production company, The Kazbah Project (currently working on the feature film, Gibran). She teaches at Columbia University.