Naomi Shihab Nye Additions

Naomi Shihab Nye, acclaimed poet who also writes essays, songs, novels, and children’s books; edits poetry anthologies, and teaches poetry writing to youth and adults, was born in 1952 in St. Louis, Missouri to Aziz Shihab, a journalist and immigrant from Palestine, and Miriam Shihab, a Montessori teacher with a fine arts degree in painting. Nye has won numerous awards, including her first major recognition for Hugging the Jukebox as a National Poetry Series selection in 1982, critical acclaim for her 2011 short story collection There Is No Long Distance Now: Very Short Stories, Best Books for Young Adults several times from the American Library Association, and the gratitude of San Antonio Independent School District teachers for her poetry teaching packets. Nye is a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and Poetry Foundation Young People’s Poet Laureate for 2019-2021. Nye referred to herself as an “itinerant writer,” referring to the twelve years from 1974-1986 she spent teaching poetry in schools around Texas, while also writing and publishing. Nye lists her early influences, starting at age five, as Carl Sandberg, Margaret Wise Brown, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, and Louisa May Alcott. High School and college influences include Henry David Thoreau, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Gertrude Stein, and William Stafford; the last of whom Nye was able to work with, and she became friends with Stafford and his family.

Nye began writing early in life, publishing poetry at age 7 and continuing throughout her childhood. She wrote a column for teens in high school, and while teaching across Texas and the country she continued to write and publish. While teaching children poetry during the Gulf War, which began in 1991, Nye read the students poetry written by Iraqi writers, and ultimately edited This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World, which includes 129 poets from 68 countries. Her young adult novel Going Going, 2005, is an attempt to recognize and document her neighborhood in San Antonio, Texas as it changed due to gentrification. This attention to the connection of people across the world, and their local daily realities, imbues Nye’s work. For Nye, the best audience is children, and she does not recognize a distinction between adult and children’s writing. While writing poetry for adults in the 1970s and 1980s, Nye searched for cross-over texts to use with the young people she was teaching. In the 1990s her editor Virginia Duncan suggested she write for children, which she did with Sitti’s Secrets, and continues today. To date, Nye has published audio recordings of songs she wrote and sang; children’s books, including picture books, poetry, poetry anthologies, and young adult novels; written and edited poetry for adults; served as a columnist for Organica and poetry editor for The Texas Observer; and contributed to numerous poetry anthologies and periodicals.

Early Life and Family

Naomi Nye and her family moved to Jerusalem when she was in high school, around 1965, where she met her father’s family for the first time. Nye attended a school that instructed in Arabic, Armenian, and English, though she only knew English. After the 6-Day War in 1967, she moved with her parents and brother to San Antonio, Texas, where she still resides. Nye graduated from high school in Texas without ever having attended a football game, and in honor of this accomplishment the football players bought her a mum. Nye attended Trinity University in San Antonio and lived with her parents. She graduated summa cum laude in 1974 with a degree in English and World Religions. In 1978, Nye married Michael Nye, a lawyer-turned-photographer, and in 1986 they had a son, Madison Cloudfeather. After college, Naomi and Michael traveled extensively in Mexico and Central America, which produced many unpublished poems from this time period, and in response to the Mexican American culture in San Antonio but lack of Mexican culture, the anthology The Tree Is Older than You Are: A Bilingual Gathering of Poems and Stories from Mexico with Paintings by Mexican Artists, decades later in 1995. Nye continued her high school work of essayist, writing numerous articles on topics from poetry to politics to housework for various newspapers, served as a columnist for Organica: A Magazine of Art and Activism.

Non-Writing Work

Nye was the most active employee at the Texas Commission on the Arts Writers in the Schools Project, working across Texas and publishing chapbook and poetry. She stopped this work in 1986 when her son was born. Nye also worked as a visiting instructor or writer in residence across US colleges and schools, as well as internationally, including at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Hawai’i Manoa, the University of Texas at Austin and at San Antonio, and Texas State University in San Marcos. Nye also contributed to two PBS television series, the “Language of Life” with Bill in 1995, and “The United States of Poetry” in 1996. As a young woman in the late 1970s, Nye wrote songs and played guitar and sang in coffee shops and for schoolchildren. She recorded an album of children’s songs, Rutabaga-Roo in 1979, and an album of folk songs, Lullaby Raft in 1981. Nye writes for adults and children, is adept in multiple genres, finds home in her backyard and wherever in the world she travels, and teaches and edits anthologies as well as writes poetry. Similarly, she is both loving and accepting of all people, and a fierce activist for peace and justice.