Khaled Mattawa was born in 1964 in Libya where he received his primary education. In 1979 he emigrated to the United States and lived in the South for many years, finishing high school in Louisiana. He has said of that experience, "People now are aware of how difficult it is for people of Arab descent to live in this country, but it was never easy. And I went to high school here, which was not an easy experience, in Louisiana." He completed bachelors degrees in political science and economics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and went on to earn an MA in English and an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University, where he also taught creative writing. He joined U-M's faculty in winter 2004. He is an assistant professor of English and teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 1995-96 he won the Alfred Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and in 1998 he was awarded a Guggenheim Poetry Fellowship. He has translated many Arab poets into English and won the University of Arkansas Press Award for Arabic Literature in Translation for Questions and Their Retinue, translations of poems by Hatif Janabi. His translation of Fadhil al-Azzawi's collection In Every Well a Joseph is Weeping won QRL's international poetry book competition in 1997. In 1999, he co-edited Post Gibran: Anthology of New Arab American Writing. His translations of Saadi Youssef, Without an Alphabet, Without a Face, was published in 2002, and was awarded the PEN poetry in Translation Prize. His translation of selected poems of Fadhil al-Azzawi, Miracle Maker, by BOA Editions was published November 2003. He has done a great deal to add Arab writers to the shelves of American literature." He has published many of his own poems and his translations in literary magazines, and has two collections of his own poems, Ismailia Eclipse (Sheep Meadow Press, 1995) and Zodiac of Echoes (2003). Currently he serves as president of Rawi, Radius of Arab American writers.
