EDT Amman - It is wonderful to meet with a writer who measures her success not by the volume of books sold but by the sheer pleasure she gives and takes from the energy generated by sentences. The sense of pause, how we may read words and go back over them and read them again and be held, suspended, taken out of time into deeper time.
Words are the connective tissue between lives.
Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother of German-Swiss origin in 1952 in St Louis, Missouri, it is no wonder that the crossing over of cultures is of great interest to the writer. She hasn't looked back since. During the formative years, when career choices were blurry ideas born of a parent's expectations and a student's own capabilities, Naomi Shihab Nye was already focused. In college I was able to know, quite consciously, that writing would be the most significant part of my life no matter what job I had. The compilation combines contemporary poets and artists with the works of established writers like Naguib Mahfouz and Nazim Hikmet.