Nathalie Handal is described as a “contemporary Orpheus.” A New Yorker of Mediterranean roots, she was raised in Latin America, France, and the Middle East, and educated in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Asia. Her recent poetry books include Life in a Country Album, winner of the Palestine Book Award; the flash collection The Republics, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers” and winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the Arab American Book Award; the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía; Love and Strange Horses, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award; and the bilingual collections Riflessi (Italian/English) and La estrella invisible (Spanish/English). Her nonfiction has appeared in Vanity Fair, Guernica, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Nation, and the Irish Times, among others. Handal is the recipient of awards from the PEN Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, Fondazione di Venezia, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, and the Africa Institute, among others. She is professor of literature and creative writing at New York University. She says: “I’m a multi-city person. My cities are New York, Rome, Paris, Bethlehem. My family-cities are Santo Domingo, Marseilles, Berlin. And currently my work-cities are in the UAE, Sicily, Japan. The city, like the body, like love, is unreachable.” Read her poem “The City”.