We're delighted to introduce our Winter Recommendation, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist and translator. She has published three poetry books: Something About Living (University of Akron Press, 2024; The 87 Press, 2025), winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry and the 2022 Akron Poetry Prize; Kaan & Her Sisters (Trio House Press), finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award and honourable mention for the 2024 Arab American Book Award; and Water & Salt (Red Hen), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award and honourable mention for the 2018 Arab American Book Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks: Arab in Newsland, winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Prize, and Letters from the Interior (Diode, 2019), finalist for the 2020 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize.
Her writing has been published in journals including Los Angeles Review of Books, Michigan Quarterly Revie, the Nation, Poets.org, Protean, and Prairie Schooner and in anthologies including The Long Devotion (Georgia Press), We Call to the Eye and the Night (Persea Press), and Gaza Unsilenced (Just World Books).
She was the translator and curator of the 2022 series “Poems from Palestine” at the Baffler magazine. In 2024 she curated a year-long subscription of Palestinian poetry books with Open Books, Seattle’s poetry-only bookstore.
Order Something About Living here, and get 25% off with your PBS Membership discount code.
(Photo credit: Renda Tuffaha)