My America: Khaled Mattawa

Accomplished poet and MacArthur Fellow Khaled Mattawa discusses his new book Fugitive Atlas, a sweeping, impassioned collection of poems that touches on themes of immigration, occupation, environment destruction and more. This program takes place November 11 at 6:30 pm Central and will be hosted live via Zoom, register for the program here.

Presented in conjunction with the American Writers Museum’s special exhibit My America: Immigrant and Refugee Writers Today, this program is part of the Jeanne M. & John W. Rowe program series, a series of conversations with leading contemporary writers about their latest work and their thoughts on themes of identity, home, belonging and the meaning of what it is to be American.

More about Fugitive Atlas:

Khaled Mattawa’s latest book, Fugitive Atlas, is a sweeping, impassioned account of refugee crises, military occupations, and ecological degradation, an acute and probing journey through a world in upheaval. Mattawa’s chorus of speakers finds moments of profound solace in searching for those lost—in elegy and prayer—even when the power of poetry and faith seems incapable of providing salvation.

With extraordinary formal virtuosity and global scope, these poems turn not to lament for those regions charted as theaters of exploitation and environmental malpractice but to a poignant amplification of the lives, dreams, and families that exist within them. In this exquisite collection, Mattawa asks how we are expected to endure our times, how we inherit the journeys of our ancestors, and how we let loose those we love into an unpredictable world.

Praise for Fugitive Atlas:

“In poems that tenderly call us to action, Mattawa awakens readers to the human and geographical devastation wrought by the tendency to ‘other’ people. Fugitive Atlas is a collaborative prayer for a shattered earth.”
—Ploughshares

“Khaled Mattawa is a master. How do his poems sear and soothe, so brilliantly, at once? He voyages in the realms of the unspeakable and speaks for us all.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye

“Fiercely principled and faithful to a revelatory wildness of mind…Fugitive Atlas arrives with an embodied sense of spiritual purpose unlike any collection of poetry I have recently encountered.”
—Major Jackson

KHALED MATTAWA currently teaches in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan. He is the author of five books of poetry, and a critical study of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Mattawa has coedited two anthologies of Arab American literature and translated several volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry. His awards include the Academy of American Poets Fellowship prize, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and a MacArthur Fellowship.