Fady Joudah

Fady Joudah was born in Austin, Texas, in 1971. The son of Palestinian refugees, he grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia before returning to the United States for college. He attended the University of Georgia–Athens, the Medical College of Georgia, and the University of Texas Medical Center in Houston, where he completed his studies in internal medicine.

In 2007 Joudah’s first poetry collection, The Earth in the Attic (Yale University Press, 2008), was selected by Louise Glück as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. In her foreword Glück writes,

Joudah’s model is less the allegory than the folktale, his language a language in which the anecdotal past is stored, renewed, and affirmed in the retellings. So, too, the chilling testimony of landscape becomes in language fixed, permanent, a means of both affirming and sustaining outrage.

Joudah is also the author of Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance (Milkweed Editions, 2018); Textu (Copper Canyon Press, 2013); and Alight (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). His translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden (Copper Canyon Press, 2006) was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and his translation of Ghassan Zaqtan’s Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me (Yale University Press, 2012), won the 2013 International Griffin Poetry Prize. 

Joudah was also the winner of the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize. In their judge’s citation, Natalie Diaz, Gregory Pardlo, and Diane Seuss noted that the prize “celebrates Palestinian American poet Fady Joudah’s significant and evolving body of work, distinguished by his courage to speak in the face of the unspeakable, in poems of lyric concision and intensity.”

Along with writing poetry, Joudah volunteers for Doctors Without Borders and serves as an emergency room physician. He lives in Houston.