Fady Joudah

Fady Joudah
Joudah at the 2009 Brooklyn Book Festival.
Born	1971 Austin, Texas
Occupation	Physician, Poet
Nationality	Palestinian-American

Fady Joudah (born 1971) is a Palestinian-American poet and physician. He is the 2007 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition for his collection of poems The Earth in the Attic.

Life

Joudah was born in Austin, Texas in 1971 to Palestinian refugee parents, and grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia. He returned to the United States to study to become a doctor, first attending the University of Georgia in Athens, and then the Medical College of Georgia, before completing his medical training at the University of Texas. Joudah currently practices as an ER physician in Houston, Texas. He has also volunteered abroad with the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders.

Joudah's poetry has been published in a variety of publications, including Poetry, The Iowa Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Kenyon Review, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner and Crab Orchard Review.

In 2006, he published The Butterfly's Burden, a collection of recent poems by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish translated from Arabic, which was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

In 2012, Joudah published Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems, a collection of poems by Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan translated from Arabic, which won the 2013 International Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2017, Joudah translated Zaqtan's The Silence That Remains. His book of poetry Alight was published in 2013. His 2021 poetry collection, Tethered to the Stars, was cited by Cleveland Review of Books as a poetry collection that "does not teach us how to answer any question it poses with a stylized rhetoric, a self-important flourish; the poems model a lyrical thinking which prompts the question itself."

Joudah won the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize, given to an American writer of “exceptional talent. His work entitled [...] was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection Shortlist and longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry.

In other media

In October 2014, Joudah was interviewed for the documentary Poetry of Witness, directed by independent filmmakers Billy Tooma and Anthony Cirilo.

Works

• The Earth in the Attic. Yale University Press. April 2008. ISBN 978-0-300-13431-5.
• Mahmoud Darwish (2007). The Butterfly's Burden. Translator Fady Joudah. Copper Canyon Press. ISBN 978-1-55659-241-6.
• Mahmoud Darwish (2009). If I were another. Translator Fady Joudah. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-374-17429-3.
• Alight (Copper Canyon Press, 2013)
• Mahmoud Darwish (2017). The Silence That Remains. Translator Fady Joudah. Copper Canyon Press. ISBN 978-1-55659-514-1.
• Contributor to A New Divan: A Lyrical Dialogue between East and West. Gingko Library, ISBN 9781909942554
• Tethered to Stars (Milkweed Editions, 2021) ISBN 9781571315342
• [...] (2024) ISBN 9781639551286