Meet our 2027 Keynote Speaker Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye describes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent more than 40 years traveling the country and the world to lead writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages. Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Drawing on her Palestinian-American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her experiences traveling in Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and the Middle East, Nye uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity.
Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than 30 volumes. Her books of poetry for adults and children include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (a finalist for the National Book Award), A Maze Me: Poems for Girls, Red Suitcase, Words Under the Words, Fuel, Transfer, You & Yours (a best-selling poetry book of 2006), Mint Snowball, Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners, Come with Me: Poems for a Journey, Honeybee (awarded the 2008 Arab American Book Award in the Children’s/Young Adult category), The Tiny Journalist (Best Poetry Book from both the Texas Institute of Letters and the Writers League of Texas), Cast Away: Poems for Our Time (one of the Washington Post's best children’s books of 2020), and Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems. Her new poetry book is Grace Notes: Poems about Families. Kirkus gave it a star and called it "Beautifully written poetry about the butterfly effect of human experience."
Nye’s collections of essays include Never in a Hurry, and I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are you Okay?. She has edited several poetry anthologies including I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You, Time You Let Me In, This Same Sky, and What Have You Lost?. She also edited an anthology on the COVID-19 pandemic titled Dear Vaccine: Global Voices Speak to the Pandemic. Nye co-edited a book with Marion Winik titled I Know About a Thousand Things; The Writings of Ann Alejandro of Uvalde, Texas.
Nye’s fiction books for young people include Habibi, Going Going, There Is No Long Distance Now, The Turtle of Oman, and its sequel, The Turtle of Michigan. The Turtle of Oman was chosen a Horn Book Best Book of 2014, a 2015 Notable Children’s Book by the American Library Association, and was awarded the 2015 Middle East Book Award for Youth Literature. Her picture books include Baby Radar, Sitti's Secrets, and Famous.
Naomi Shihab Nye was a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). She has also been the recipient of many awards and prizes including a Lavan Award, Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, four Pushcart Prizes, Robert Creeley Prize, NSK Neustadt Award for Children’s Literature, May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award, Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement, two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards, the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement, the 2024 Texas Writer Award and the 2024 Wallace Stevens Award. In 2021 she was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Nye was affiliated with The Michener Center for writers at the University of Texas at Austin for 20 years and was also poetry editor at The Texas Observer for 20 years. In 2019-2020 she was the editor for New York Times Magazine poems. She is Chancellor Emeritus for the Academy of American Poets and is Professor of Creative Writing - Poetry at Texas State University.
Books from Aimee Nezhukumatathuil . . .
Register for Aimee’s Craft Talk and Keynote Speech
Register for Aimee’s Craft Talk to be attended in person on Friday May 15 from 2:00 -4:00pm.
Can’t be with us in person? You can register for Aimee’s Craft Talk to be viewed on Zoom, as well as her Keynote Speech.
When the world feels too heavy, when the blank page looks like a sky without stars—what do we do? Aimee Nezhukumatathil invites writers to consider what the night creatures already know: that darkness is not absence, but invitation. Through a fresh look at nocturnal animals and bioluminescent beings as teachers, this talk encourages and gives concrete tips on how to keep creating, how to keep glowing, even when light feels far away. This talk will remind writers that their unique voices are necessary glimmers in the larger constellation of literature, and that resilience often looks like sitting still long enough to notice what begins to glow.
This listing is for those of you who can’t be in person at the Festival.
Taking inspiration from Mary Oliver's poem, "The Summer Day," we will look to the outdoors for observation and inspiration for several new poem drafts.
If you can’t be at the 2026 Festival in person, sign up to participate in Aimee’s Craft Talk online. Register here, and you’ll receive an email with a link to the Zoom call the morning of the event.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the New York Times best-selling author of the forthcoming poetry book, Night Owl (Mar. 2026), and two illustrated collections of essays, Bite by Bite and World of Wonders: Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments. She also wrote four previous award-winning poetry collections, and with the poet Ross Gay, she co-authored the chapbook Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review.
2026 Craft Talk with Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Taking inspiration from Mary Oliver's poem, "The Summer Day," we will look to the outdoors for observation and inspiration for several new poem drafts.