Khaled Mattawa was born in Benghazi, Libya, in 1964 and emigrated to the US in 1979, where he studied at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, taking a Masters in English and an MFA in creative writing at Indiana University. He received a PhD from Duke University and currently teaches in the graduate creative writing programme at the University of Michigan. He is the author of four books of poetry, the latest of which, Tocqueville, won the 2010 San Francisco Poetry Center Prize. Mattawa has translated eleven volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry, including Adonis’s Selected Poems and Concerto Al-Quds, Iman Mersal’s These Are Not Oranges My Love and Fadhil al-Azzawi’s Miracle Maker. His book Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet’s Arts and His Nation was a finalist for the Pegasus Prize. A MacArthur fellow, his other awards include the Academy of American Poets Fellowship prize and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.