Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Middle East, and educated in the United States, United Kingdom and Asia. Claire Messud writes, she is “a contemporary Orpheus.” Her recent poetry books include Life in A Country Album, winner of the 2020 Palestine Book Award and finalist for the Foreword Book Award; the flash collection The Republics, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers,” and winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing, and the Arab American Book Award; the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía; and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award. She is the author of eight plays, editor of two anthologies, and her flash essays and creative nonfiction have appeared in Vanity Fair, Guernica Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, The Irish Times, among others. Handal is the recipient of awards from the PEN Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, Fondazione di Venezia, among others. She is Associate Professor of Practice in Literature & Creative Writing at New York University–AD, and writes the literary travel column ‘The City and the Writer’ for Words without Borders magazine.