Jawdat Fakhreddine

Jawdat Fakhreddine is a Lebanese poet and professor emeritus of Arabic literature at the Lebanese University in Beirut. He was born in 1953 in a small village in southern Lebanon. He has published more than twelve poetry collections and two works of literary criticism. He regularly contributed to newspapers and journals across the Arab world.  His collection of children’s poems, Thirty Poems for Children, won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for that category in 2014. It has since appeared in an English and a French translation from Bookland Press, Canada. His poetry has been translated to French, German, and English. Translated works include Lighthouse of the Drowning (BOA Editions, 2017) and The Sky that Denied Me (University of Texas Press, 2020). He teaches Arabic literature at the American University of Beirut and his most recent collection Fī shu\’ʾūn al-basīrah (Matters of Vision) just came out from Dar al-Nahda, Beirut.

Huda J. Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge, 2023). She is the co-translator of Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA editions, 2017), The Sky That Denied Me: Selections from Jawdat Fakhreddine (University of Texas Press, 2020), and Come, Take a Gentle Stab: Selections from Salim Barakat (Seagull Books, 2021).  She is the co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures and an editor of the Library of Arabic Literature. Her book of creative non-fiction titled Zaman saghīr taḥt shams thāniya (A Brief Time under a Different Sun) was published by Dar al-Nahda, Beirut in 2019.