Khaled Mattawa

Khaled Mattawa was born in Benghazi, Libya in 1964 and immigrated to the U.S. in his teens.

His collections of poetry include Ismailia Eclipse (Sheep Meadow, 1995), Zodiac of Echoes (Ausable, 2003), Amorisco (2008) and Tocqueville (New Issues, 2010).

Mattawa has also translated many volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry and co-edited two anthologies of Arab American literature. His many books of translation include Adonis: Selected Poems (Yale, 2010), Invitation to a Secret Feast (Tupelo, 2008) by Joumana Haddad, A Red Cherry on A White-Tile Floor (Copper Canyon, 2007) by Maram Al-Massri, Miracle Maker, Selected Poems of Fadhil Al-Azzawi (BOA Editions, 2004) and Without An Alphabet, Without A Face: Selected Poems of Saadi Youssef (Graywolf, 2002), among others.

The poet Yusef Komunyakaa has described his work as "novelistic in its reach and depth" and the poet Marilyn Hacker writes that it "is politically astute, formally daring, grips the reader with an intelligence that spotlights, too, its sensual and emotional (and historical) accuracy."

Mattawa is the 2010 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the PEN American Center Poetry Translation Prize, and three Pushcart Prizes.

Currently, Mattawa teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.