Threa Almontaser

Threa Almontaser is a Yemeni American poet and scholar. She is the author of The Wild Fox of Yemen, winner of the Walt Whitman award of the Academy of American Poets in 2020.

Threa Almontaser
OccupationPoet, translator, multimedia artist
EducationNorth Carolina State University
Notable worksThe Wild Fox of Yemen
Notable awardsWalt Whitman award of the Academy of American Poets (2020)
Website
Almontaser's website

Early life and education

Threa Almontaser was born and raised in New York. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing and her TESOL certification from North Carolina State University.[1]

Career

Almontaser's first poetry collection, The Wild Fox of Yemen (Graywolf Press, 2021), was selected by Harryette Mullen as the winner of the 2020 Walt Whitman Award, established by the Academy of American Poets. The Whitman award was established in 1975 to encourage emerging poets, who have not published a poetry collection. The award includes a six-week residency in Umbria, Italy, and $5,000.[2] Mullen described Almontaser's work: “The spirit of Whitman lives in these poems that sing and celebrate a vibrant, rebellious body with all its physical and spiritual entanglements. Formally and linguistically diverse, these bold, defiant declarations of ‘reckless’ embodiment acknowledge the self's nesting identities, proclaiming the individual's intricate relations to others, the one in the many and the many in the one. Ultimately, they ask how to belong to others without losing oneself, how to be faithful to oneself without forsaking others."[3]

Almontaser was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of The Net, and the Best New Poets series. She is a recipient of the 2017 Unsilenced Grant for Muslim American Women Writers, and has received scholarships from Tin House, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Community of Writers, The Kerouac Project, the Fine Arts Work Center, and Vermont Studio Center. [4] Almontaser won the 2018 Brett Elizabeth Jenkins poetry prize, the 2019 Claire Keyes poetry award, as well as the 9th annual Nazim Hikmet poetry competition.[5][6]

Almontaser currently teaches English to immigrants and refugees in Raleigh, North Carolina.[1] She will be in Malaysia as a U.S. Fulbright candidate in 2021.[7]

Selected publications

Awards
  • Walt Whitman award, The Wild Fox of Yemen, (2020)[2]
  • Tupelo Press Dorset Poetry Prize, finalist (2020)[7]
  • Yes Yes Books Pamet River Prize, finalist (2020)[7]

References
  1. "Threa Almontaser". Poets.org. Retrieved 4 July 2020.
  2. "Yemeni-American poet Threa Almontaser wins Whitman award". AP News. Retrieved 4 July 2020.
  3. "The Arab Weekly". Yemeni-American poet Threa Almontaser wins Walt Whitman Award. Retrieved 4 July 2020.
  4. "2017 Unsilenced Grant Winner: Threa Almontaser". The Coil Magazine. Retrieved 4 July 2020.
  5. Downes-Le Guin, India. "Threa Almontaser". Tin House. Retrieved 4 July 2020.
  6. "Threa Almontaser". Baltimore Review. Retrieved 4 July 2020.
  7. "Threa Almontaser". Threa Almontaser website. Retrieved 4 July 2020.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.