Khaled Mattawa Named Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets

posted on: Jan 21, 2014

The Academy of American Poets announced today that noted translator Khaled Mattawa was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, an honorary position that has been held by some of the most distinguished poets in the United States, including Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Lucille Clifton, Adrienne Rich, Yusef Komunyakaa, and John Ashbery.

As a member of the Board of Chancellors, Mattawa will consult with the organization on matters of artistic programming, serve as judges for the organization’s largest prizes for poets, and act as ambassadors of poetry in the world at large. Mattawa was selected by the 15 members of the Academy’s current Board of Chancellors, and he will serve for a period of six years.

Mattawa as born in Benghazi, Libya, in 1964 and immigrated to the United States in his teens. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including his latest, Tocqueville (New Issues, 2010). He has also translated many volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry and coedited two anthologies of Arab American literature. Mattawa is the recipient of the 2010 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alfred Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, and the PEN American Center Poetry Translation Prize, among others. Mattawa teaches in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Academy Chancellor Marilyn Hacker said, Mattawa “is one of the best, most inventive, lyrical and intellectually challenging American poets of his generation. His work is as daring in its amalgam of poetic techniques as it is dazzling in the breadth of its subject matter.”

For more information about the Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, visit www.poets.org/chancellors.

Founded in 1934, the Academy of American Poets is the nation’s largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation of contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. Each year, the Academy connects millions of people to great poetry through programs such as Poets.org; National Poetry Month in April; American Poet, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events.

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