Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is author of three books of poetry: Something About Living (UAkron, 2024), winner of the 2024 National Book Award and winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry, Kaan & Her Sisters (Trio House Press), finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award and honorable mention for the 2024 Arab American Book Award; and Water & Salt (Red Hen), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award and honorable mention for the 2018 Arab American Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Arab in Newsland, winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Prize, and Letters from the Interior (Diode, 2019), finalist for the 2020 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Michigan Quarterly Revie, the Nation, Poets.org, Protean, and Prairie Schooner and in anthologies including The Long Devotion (Georgia Press), We Call to the Eye and the Night (Persea Press), and Gaza Unsilenced (Just World Books).

Lena was born in Seattle but raised in Saudi Arabia and Jordan. She has lived the experiences of a first-generation American immigrant, and expatriate. Her heritage is Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian. Fluent in Arabic and English, many of her poems are inspired by the experience of crossing cultural, geographic and political borders, borders between languages, between the present and the living past. She is passionate about a free Palestine, the perfect cup of coffee, poetry, language, and gardening. She lives with her family in Redmond, Washington.