Poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan was born in Carbondale, Illinois, the daughter of a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother. Her family moved to Kuwait after she was born and returned to the United States to seek political asylum after Iraq invaded Kuwait during the Gulf War. She grew up in Oklahoma, Texas, Maine, and the UAE, then moved to Lebanon for her high school and college education. She earned a BA from the American University of Beirut, an MA from Columbia University, and a PsyD from Rutgers University, where she specialized in trauma and addiction work.
Alyan’s most recent poetry collection is The Moon That Turns You Back (Ecco, 2024). She is the author of four previous collections: The Twenty-Ninth Year (Mariner, 2019); Hijra (Southern Illinois University, 2016), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry; Four Cities (Black Lawrence Press, 2015); and Atrium (Three Rooms Press, 2012), winner of the Arab American Book Award in Poetry. She has also written two novels: Salt Houses (HMH, 2017), winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, and The Arsonists’ City, (HMH, 2021), shortlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize.
Alyan’s work has been published by the New Yorker, TIME, The Guardian, the Academy of American Poets, Lit Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. The recipient of a Lannan Foundation fellowship, she acted in director Darine Hotait’s short films I Say Dust (2015) and Tallahassee (2021).
Alyan lives in Brooklyn with her husband, where she works as a clinical psychologist and an adjunct assistant professor at New York University.
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More Hala Alyan
Text: Ewa Chrusciel interviews Hala Alyan for The Rumpus
Text/Audio: Alyan's poem "When They Pledge Allegiance, I Say" at Adroit Journal
Video: Alyan speaks at TEDx Brooklyn
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Photo by Williams Cole.