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Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her most recent book, Something About Living, (University of Akron, 2024), won the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry and was selected for the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry. She is also the author of Kaan and Her Sisters (Trio House, 2023), finalist for the 2024 Firecracker and Arab American Book Awards, and Water and Salt (Red Hen, 2017), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award.

National Poetry Month, Poetry

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Apr 8, 2025

National Poetry Month: Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Have you dressed for the mirror today Have you draped the darkening glass in gauze
Poems, Poetry, Rumpus Original

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

May 15, 2021

Rumpus Original Poetry: “Fragments from a Sudden Crescendo”

Museumed graves / intone a call to prayer / for the living.
Features & Reviews, Poetry, Reviews

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Dec 18, 2020

The Worlds We Inhabit: Home: New Arabic Poems

These writers expand the meaning of the word home by virtue of their lives and their writing.
Features & Reviews, Poetry, Reviews

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Jan 31, 2020

The Fraught Nature of Belonging: Nathalie Handal’s Life in a Country Album

Each poem opens a window into cities and vocabularies of exile.
Features & Reviews, Poetry, Reviews

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Mar 2, 2018

This Most Vulnerable of Houses: Fady Joudah’s Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance

These poems, poised at the intersections of the material, the metaphorical, and the spiritual, fold into and out of one another as their boundaries dissolve with question after question.