Khaled Mattawa was born on 1964 and is a Libyan poet, and a renowned Arab-American writer, he is a leading literary translator, focusing on translating Arabic poetry into English.
12 Facts About Khaled Mattawa
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Khaled Mattawa was born in Benghazi, the second largest city in Libya where he spent his childhood and early teens.
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Khaled Mattawa 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.
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Khaled Mattawa went on to earn an MA in English and an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University where he taught creative writing.
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Khaled Mattawa was a professor of English and Creative Writing at California State University, Northridge.
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Khaled Mattawa received his PhD from Duke University in 2009.
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Khaled Mattawa's 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.
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Khaled Mattawa 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.
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Khaled Mattawa contributed and edited two Anthologies on Arab American Literature.
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Khaled Mattawa is a contributing editor for Banipal magazine, the leading independent magazine of contemporary Arab literature translated into English.
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Khaled Mattawa was president of Radius of Arab American Writers organization RAWI.
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Khaled Mattawa won the former for his translation of Hatif Janabi's poetry and the latter for Selected Poems of Adunis.