Threa Almontaser
Threa Almontaser | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Author |
| Education | North Carolina State University |
| Notable works | The Wild Fox of Yemen |
| Notable awards | Walt Whitman award of the Academy of American Poets (2020) |
| Website | |
| Almontaser's website | |
Threa Almontaser is a multidisciplinary artist and award-winning writer. She is the author of The Wild Fox of Yemen, winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, inaugural winner of the Maya Angelou Book Award, winner of the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, and longlisted for the National Book Award.
Early life and education[]
Threa Almontaser learned English in elementary school and began writing short stories and poems at a very young age, primarily in the form of scribbles that she read out loud to her family. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing and her TESOL certification from North Carolina State University.[1]
Career[]
Almontaser's debut poetry collection, The Wild Fox of Yemen (Graywolf Press), was selected by Harryette Mullen as winner of the 2020 Walt Whitman Award established by the Academy of American Poets just eight months after graduating from her MFA program. 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. [2] Mullen described Almontaser's work: “These poems 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 has been published for the Pushcart Prize, Best of The Net, and the Best New Poets series. She is a recipient of the Unsilenced Grant for Muslim American Women Writers, and has received support in her career from Duke, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Program. Almontaser also teaches English to immigrants and refugees in her area.
Selected publications[]
- The Wild Fox of Yemen, (Graywolf Press, 2021)
References[]
- ^ "Threa Almontaser". Poets.org. Retrieved 4 July 2020.
- ^ "Yemeni-American poet Threa Almontaser wins Whitman award". AP News. Retrieved 4 July 2020.
- ^ "The Arab Weekly". Yemeni-American poet Threa Almontaser wins Walt Whitman Award. Retrieved 4 July 2020.
- Living people
- American women poets
- 21st-century American poets
- 21st-century American women writers
- People from New York City
- American people of Yemeni descent