Khaled Mattawa (Arabic: خالد مطاوع; born 1964) is a Libyan poet, and a renowned Arab-American writer, he is also a leading literary translator, focusing on translating Arabic poetry into English. He works as an Assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States, where he currently lives and writes.^[1]

Background

Khaled Mattawa was born in Benghazi, the second largest city in Libya where he spent his childhood and early teens. In 1979 he emigrated to the United States. He lived in the south for many years, finishing high school in Louisiana at St. Paul's School and completing bachelor's degrees in political science and economics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He went on to earn an MA in English and an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University where he taught creative writing. He was a professor of English and Creative Writing at California State University, Northridge. He received his PhD from Duke University in 2009.

His work has appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, New England Review, Callaloo, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry East, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review and The Pushcart Prize XIX, The Best American Poetry 1997 anthologies.^[2]

Khaled Mattawa began writing poetry in the late 1980s. His first collection of poems was published 1995. He then started working on translating Arabic poetry of renowned Arab poets into English, his first translation Questions and Their Retinue: Selected Poems of Iraqi poet Hatif Janabi was published in 1996. He contributed and edited two Anthologies on Arab American Literature.^[3]

Khaled Mattawa is a contributing editor for Banipal magazine, the leading independent magazine of contemporary Arab literature translated into English.^[3] He was president of Radius of Arab American Writers organization RAWI.^[4]

In 2014, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.^[5] In 2019 he was a contributor to A New Divan: A Lyrical Dialogue between East and West.

Awards and recognition

Khaled Mattawa has received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2014,^[6] an Academy of American Poets award, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation in 2003 and 2011, a 1997 Guggenheim Fellowship,^[7] the Alfred Hodder fellowship from Princeton University 1995-1996, an NEA translation grant, and two Pushcart prizes.^[1]

Mattawa has also won the Arkansas Arabic Translation Prize and the Banipal Prize. These are the two major awards for translation of Arabic literature into English. He won the former for his translation of Hatif Janabi's poetry and the latter for Selected Poems of Adunis. The only other person to have won both the Arkansas and the Banipal awards is Samah Selim.