William Wilhartz Endowed Professor of English Language and Literature
About
Khaled Mattawa is the author of five books of poetry: Fugitive Atlas (Graywolf Press, 2020), Tocqueville (New Issues Press, 2010), Amorisco (Ausable Press, 2008), Zodiac of Echoes (Ausable Press, 2003), and Ismailia Eclipse (Sheep Meadow Press, 1996), as well as the chapbook Mare Nostrum (Sarabande Books, 2019). His poems have been translated into Arabic, Greek, Italian, French, and Spanish.
He is also the author of Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet’s Art and His Nation (Syracuse University Press) and How Long Have You Been with Us: Essays on Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2016).
Mattawa has translated eleven books of contemporary Arabic poetry by Adonis, Saadi Youssef, Fadhil Al-Azzawi, Hatif Janabi, Maram Al-Massri, Joumana Haddad, Amjad Nasser, and Iman Mersal. He has co-edited three major anthologies of Arab American literature: Post-Gibran (Syracuse University Press, 1999), Dinarzad’s Children(University of Arkansas Press, 2004; expanded edition 2008), and Beyond Memory (University of Arkansas Press, 2020).
He is a co-founder of the Arete Foundation for Arts and Culture, where he has played a central role in initiating and leading literary and cultural projects focused on Libya, Arabic literature, and the Arab diaspora. These include Sun on Closed Windows / شمس على نوافذ مغلقة (2017), an Arabic-language anthology of poetry and prose by a new generation of Libyan writers, edited with Laila Moghrabi, which became a focal point of public debate in Libya and internationally around artistic freedom; Album Libya, a literary and visual project engaging Libyan history and memory; Qasaed lil-Hayat (قصائد للحياة), an initiative bringing poetry into public life; and Alghurfa 211 (مجلة الغرفة ٢١١), a cultural journal devoted to contemporary Libyan cultural and intellectual expression by writers and artists inside Libya and in the diaspora.
Mattawa’s honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship Prize, the PEN America Award for Poetry in Translation, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, an NEA Translation Grant, and four Pushcart Prizes. In 2016, he received the University of Michigan Regents’ Award for Public Service. He also served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2014 to 2019.
His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in Poetry, PMLA, The Kenyon Review, The Guardian, The Nation, American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Poetry London, Best American Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. He has served as editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review since 2018. He is the William Wilhartz Endowed Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan.
Mattawa holds a B.S. in Political Science from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, and a Ph.D. in English from Duke University. Born in Benghazi, Libya, he immigrated to the United States in his teens.
Research Interests
Primary Interests
Writing Poetry
Secondary Interests
Modern and Contemporary Anglophone Poetry, Comparative Poetics, Arab and Muslim American Literature, and Translation.
