The poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha traces her love of writing to summers spent at her grandfather’s house in Amman, Jordan. It was an idyllic place, bursting at the seams with grandchildren, and located in a neighborhood long inhabited by writers. “Every single room almost had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in it,” she recalls over Zoom from her home in Washington state, a stack of books leaning precariously behind her, glasses resting atop her head as if ready to read at a moment’s notice. Her grandfather, who served as the poet laureate of Jordan, “sat at the dining room table every morning and would draft with his fountain pen in longhand.” For Khalaf Tuffaha—whose latest poetry collection, Something About Living, won the 2024 National Book Award—this scene left an indelible imprint. “Writing was human and accessible,” she says. “It was happening at my source of joy.”
Born in Seattle in 1975, Khalaf Tuffaha grew up across the Arab world—Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait—before returning to the U.S. on the eve of the Gulf War, in September of 1990. She grounds her tendency to write about teachers in this peripatetic upbringing. “I lived in multiple different cities, and in those cities, my parents moved me around in different school systems,” she said. “I was a new person often. Sometimes a great teacher can make that experience much gentler.” Khalaf Tuffaha, who is of Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian heritage and speaks English and Arabic, took particular refuge in language. “Language teachers are really important to me,” she said. “Language was my way of connecting in new places, mastery of language gave me access when other things weren't available.”
As a student at the University of Washington, where she studied comparative literature, she discovered the work of June Jordan. She recalls coming across one of Jordan’s books at the bookstore next to her bus stop. The next thing she knew, she was sitting on the floor, copying poems into her journal. “I randomly pulled Living Room off the shelf,” she said, referencing Jordan’s 1985 collection, which includes a number of poems expressing solidarity with Palestinians. “Imagine! I had never heard of her. No one in any literature class I had taken ever said anything about her—but of course, makes total sense given what she was writing about.”
Reading Jordan’s poem “Apologies to the People of Lebanon,” which Jordan dedicates “to the 60,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948-1983,” Khalaf Tuffaha says she felt a kinship with its author. “It was shocking to see myself, people I belong to…to see an engagement with us as members of the human family,” she recalls. “I was riveted by this American poet who was also interested in being part of the world.”
Palestinian life is also the subject of Khalaf Tuffaha’s Something About Living, the opening epigraph of which draws from Jordan’s poem “Moving towards Home”: “because I need to speak about home / I need to speak about living room / where the land is not bullied and beaten into / a tombstone.” The collection also draws its name from Khalaf Tuffaha’s poem “Letter to June Jordan in September.”
Something About Living, published in April 2024, is Khalaf Tuffaha’s third full-length collection. Her debut collection, Water & Salt, was published by Red Hen Press in 2018 and won a Washington State Book Award. She calls her second collection, Kaan and Her Sisters, her “Toni Morrison book”—referencing the novelist’s remark that “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” Khalaf Tuffaha submitted it for several years until it was finally published by Trio House Press in 2023. “I was obsessed with the idea of Kaan for years—sketches of those poems happened right after the beginning of the Arab Spring,” she says. “For obvious reasons, that was an earth-shattering, history-altering series of events.”
Something About Living had an easier journey, with University of Akron Press being one of the first places she sent it to. Its selection by Adrien Matejka for the 2022 Akron Poetry Prize was announced on September 30th, 2022—just weeks after the announcement for the acquisition of Kaan and Her Sisters, for Trio House’s 2022 Trio Award. With the two collections published in such quick succession, Khalaf Tuffaha recalls feeling like there was little time to process either work.
Khalaf Tuffaha did not always plan to be a poet. In 2005, she cofounded the Institute of Middle Eastern Understanding, a nonprofit that aims to provide journalists with access to information about Palestine. She had a skill for writing political essays, and wanted to put it to use. Poetry, on the other hand, felt like a personal pursuit for a later time. Becoming a mother, she says, motivated her to pursue her passion for poetry. She earned her MFA in poetry at Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residence program in 2017.
That same year, Khalaf Tuffaha was named as the inaugural poet-in-residence at the poetry bookstore Open Books in Seattle. Owner Billie Swift said that her residency helped open readers up to new works. “She wrote knowing the bulk of her audience would most likely be unfamiliar with many of the Arab and Arab American poets she referenced,” Swift said. “I always marvel at how she’s able to move her audience with a steady pressure of revelation and invitation.” In 2024, she curated a year-long subscription of Palestinian poetry books with Open Books.
In addition to being a poet, she is also a translator, editor, and community organizer. From 2021 to 2022, she coedited and cotranslated the Poems from Palestine series at the Baffler alongside Fady Joudah, and last year she served as the curator of the Words Without Borders series Against Silence: Palestinian Writing in English. Khalaf Tuffaha says she loves how translation “immediately reduces me back to a fully intimidated student,” calling it “a great way to stay young.”
Khalaf Tuffaha also believes in the power of writing to challenge a reader, and through discomfort grow their world. Accepting the prize in poetry at last year's National Book Awards, she evoked the words of June Jordan that “to tell the truth is…to begin to love yourself” while donning a Palestinian thobe. “We are now living in the second November of the American-funded genocide in Palestine—I hope that every one of us can love ourselves enough to stand up and to make it stop,” she said during her speech. “Our service is needed as writers…in every room, in every space, especially where there is something to risk, or there is an opportunity to be lost, where that courage will really cost you.”
She hopes her win can bring heightened visibility and more opportunities to Arab American writers and readers. "It's a huge gift to have Something About Living receive this recognition if for nothing other than the opportunity to have the work be more deeply read,” Khalaf Tuffaha says. “Especially for Arab American writers, I just don't think we get that…. I hope that changes, not just for me.”
When asked if, despite the difficult histories explored in her work, she can locate a sense of joy in her writing, she laughs. “God, I hope I'm writing towards some distant joy,” she says. “I want to put it in a deeply Arab way—joy is not somehow separate from grief. In the heart, joy is maintained through the love that is shared in community—not a kind of Western detachment. I think the impulse to write is an impulse to live.”
