Palestinian-American writer, editor and educator Naomi Shihab Nye grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas. Graduate of Trinity University, she has been Young People’s Poet Laureate for the U.S. (Poetry Foundation), poetry editor for the New York Times magazine, and The Texas Observer, and a visiting writer in hundreds of schools and communities all over the world, currently at Texas State University. Her books include Grace Notes, Everything Comes Next, The Tiny Journalist, Voices in the Air, Sitti’s Secrets, Habibi, This Same Sky, & The Tree is Older than You Are: Poems & Paintings from Mexico. Her volume 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, was a finalist for the National Book Award. The Turtle of Oman and The Turtle of Michigan have both been part of the Little Read program, North Carolina. She received Lifetime Achievement Awards from The Texas Institute of Letters, The National Book Critics Circle (Ivan Sandrof Award), the Arab American Museum, and the National Book Critics Circle.
Naomi Shihab Nye is attending the 2024 Texas Book Festival with both her poetry collection Grace Notes: Poems About Families and the collection I Know About a Thousand Things: The Writings of Ann Alejandro of Uvalde, Texas, edited by both Nye and Marion Winik.