NYE, Naomi Shihab

Born 12 March 1952, St. Louis, Missouri

Daughter of Aziz and Miriam Allwardt Shihab; married Michael Nye, 1978; children Madison

Naomi Nye's poetry celebrates moments of grace when, through ordinary acts, people confirm one another. She asserts that poetry itself and poetic voice depend upon these ordinary acts of recognition. In "Coming into Cuzco," the closing poem of Nye's first collection, Different Ways to Pray (1980), the poet describes herself as a newly arrived and disoriented traveler, unable to speak—"That morning my mouth was a buried spoon"—until she is noticed on the bus by the young girl she has noticed: "And she handed me one perfect pink rose, / because we had noticed each other, and that was all." Nye's attention to the simple acts of human communion wherever and however they occur springs from a generosity and acuity forged by a sense of her own multifaceted identity.

Born in 1952 of a Palestinian father and an American mother, Nye began to write when she was very young, publishing her first poem when she was seven. In 1966, with her brother and parents, she left Missouri and moved to Jerusalem. They left Jerusalem the next year, eventually settling in San Antonio, Texas, where Nye received her B.A. from Trinity University in 1974. After graduation, Nye became a poet-in-the-schools in 1975 for the Texas Arts Commission. She has been Holloway Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, lecturer in poetry at the University of Texas at Austin, and visiting writer at the University of Hawaii. She has traveled widely as a visiting writer for more than 20 years, conducting workshops with teachers and students of all ages, and has traveled to the Middle East and Asia for the U.S. Information Agency's "Arts America Program."

Nye's desire to be at home in multiple human communities, her experience of her father's exile and restless wandering, and her acute sense of place is reflected in all of her poetry. Different Ways to Pray attends to human landscapes, from a local Texas street to the Guatemalan jungle and to the human need for a sense of connection. Hugging the Jukebox (1982) continues her argument that the human voice finds its proper song by acts of orientation in a world both familiar and strange. A young boy in Honduras, separated from his land and his mother, clings to his grandparents' jukebox and sings love songs; trash pickers on Madison Street "murmur in language soft as rags." Nye has a deep respect for human utterance and for each person's attempt to find a place in a world that is generous but cool, that does not grant identity until the attempt is made for it.

In Yellow Glove (1986) Nye's vision is darker and she records the enormous cost of not finding the objects or persons that ground you in the world: "Part of the difference between floating and going down." The book is filled with vulnerable people holding resolutely to objects so as not to fall apart, with broken and fallen objects, and with cries to earth about human cruelty: "Who calls anyone civilized ?" Yet, Nye's vision of the world as filled with tenderness and wry comedy endures.

Both Different Ways to Pray and Hugging the Jukebox received the Voertman Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Hugging was chosen by Josephine Miles as National Poetry Series Winner in 1982, and as one of the Most Notable Books by the American Library Association. Her honors also include a 1997-98 Guggenheim Fellowship, the I. B. Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, four Pushcart Prizes, the Charity Randall Prize for Spoken Poetry from the International Poetry Forum, a Ford Salute to Education award, and the 1997 Distinguished Alumna Award from Trinity University. She serves as poetry editor for the Texas Observer.

In addition to her work as a poet, Nye is a songwriter and singer who has recorded two albums, Rutabaga Roo (1979) and Lullaby Raft (1981). Nye is a translator for PROTA (Project of Translation from Arabic Literature) and her work appears in Modern Arabic Poetry (1987); she has also rendered into English the poems of Muhammad al-Maghut, The Fan of Swords (1991), and poems found in Fadwa Tuquan's autobiography, A Mountainous Journey. She published an international anthology of poems for young readers, This Same Sky in 1992, and recent publications include Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (a compilation of earlier poems, 1995), Fuel (1998), and What Have You Lost? (1999, with photographs by Michael Nye). In addition, there are Sitti's Secret (1994), Benito's Dream Bottle (1995), Lullaby Raft (1996), Never in a Hurry: Essays on People and Places (1996), and Habibi (1997).

As a poet, essayist, novelist, anthologist, and singer, Nye's rich and diverse works reach out to young and old in all parts of the world. Her poem, "The Art of Disappearing," encouraged Bill Moyers, who was recovering from bypass surgery, to go forward with plans for The Language of Life with Bill Moyers, an eight-part series on the Public Broadcasting Station (PBS) in 1995 on which she appeared. Nye has also been featured on another PBS series, The United States of Poetry and on National Public Radio.In 1999 Nye, joined by husband Michael Nye, made a striking presentation, a collaborative illustrated lecture in Trinity University's Stieren Arts Enrichment Series. The couple asked, "What Are You Looking For?" exploring through words and photographs the themes of language, reading, seeing, observing, and listening.

Nye's life is full with her writing, poetry readings, speaking, and teaching, but she observed in a Texas Monthly article in 1998, "Poetry requires us to slow down, to take time to pause." A collection of essays, aptly titled Never in a Hurry (1996), similarly evokes her commitment to a thoughtful pace. Her poetry and her essays have an intelligence and a gentleness reflecting her knowledge of language, her passion for the craft of writing, her love of reading, and her powers of observation. The words that so moved Bill Moyers in 1995, "Walk around feeling like a leaf. / Know you could tumble any second. / Then decide what to do with your time," exemplify her acute sense of experiencing and appreciating life.