Naomi Shihab Nye fulfills the old saying about not being born in Texas but getting here as fast as she could. Born in Missouri, raised in Jerusalem, in 1966 her family relocated to San Antonio. “My parents came here rather randomly,” she said. “They didn’t have jobs or anything set up, and it seemed a bit reckless to a teenager.”
Yet it was the move that defined her artistic and personal life. For even though the critically lauded poet has been acclaimed across the world, her connection to Texas and its possibilities has remained a constant throughout her writing life. Recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, at this week’s Texas Book Festival she will be honored with the 2024 Texas Writer Award, to which she said she was “deeply grateful and touched and shocked, because it’s been a wonderful thing being a writer in Texas.”
“It’s been a wonderful thing being a writer in Texas.” – Naomi Shihab Nye
And that’s all of Texas. While she still lives in San Antonio, there’s scarcely a corner of the state she has not visited and written about in a career that explains why her parents made the choice to move here. “They saw Texas as a place that had room – room for them, room for many, a spaciousness of all kinds.” Since her early days traveling from town to town as a writer-in-schools with the Texas Commission on the Arts to her most recent signing tour for her latest books, “I never felt that I was not welcome because I was not from that town or even born in this state. I always felt a certain hospitality.”
She has become an institution, and become connected with institutions, currently serving as a faculty member at Texas State University after two decades teaching at UT’s Michener Center for Writers. Yet she’s never pursued a full-time academic position. “I was more of a vagabond,” she said. “I wanted to have a life where I could look at everything.“
Yet lecturing and teaching are just as important to her as writing. “My real job is an encourager,” she added, and that ties into her third career as an editor for the Texas Observer and New York Times “picking poems for their Sunday magazine during the worst part of the pandemic.” Yet her most recent editorial project is more deeply personal. Aside from the publication of her latest collection of poetry for young people, Grace Notes, Nye worked with erstwhile Chronicle contributor Marion Winik to edit I Know About a Thousand Things: The Writings of Ann Alejandro of Uvalde, Texas. Diagnosed aged 32 with debilitating fibromyalgia, Alejandro was a prolific writer of letters that her friend Nye called “beautiful writing, intimate and exquisite,” letters that deserved a home “bigger than someone’s mailbox.” Yet Alejandro refused to have her work published during her lifetime, only agreeing to let Nye and Winik publish it posthumously. Now the duo gets to honor her just as Nye is being honored by her adoptive state. Nye said, “I think that would thrill her. We feel such pride and joy that this has happened.”
2024 Texas Writer Award Presentation
Saturday, Nov. 16, 11am, Capitol Auditorium
A Literary Life in Letters: The Writing of Ann Alejandro
Sunday, Nov. 17, 1pm, Poetry Tent
More Panels With Poetry in Mind
Minnesota-based Graywolf Press is arguably the most important small press of the last half century: Poets Mary Jo Bang, Nick Flynn, Sally Wen Mao, and Mark Wunderlich celebrate its impact with director and publisher Carmen Giménez. (Raised by Wolves: Fifty Poets on Fifty Poems, Saturday, Nov. 16, noon, Capitol Extension Room E2.014)
Three former Texas state poets laureate – Jenny Browne, Carrie Fountain, and ire’ne lara silva – are joined by their peer, Cecily Parks, to discuss the pain and glories of the Lone Star State as expressed in their new anthology, Texas, Being: A State of Poems. (State of Complexity: Poets on the Beauty and Brutality of Texas, Sunday, Nov. 17, 11am, Poetry Tent)
2024 Texas Poet Laureate and Torch Literary Arts founder Amanda Johnston moderates a discussion with two of the most lauded poets on her imprint’s roster about how they have centered the mental health of Black women in their works. (Torch Literary Arts Presents: A Conversation with Morgan Parker & Lynne Thompson, Saturday, Nov. 16, 10am, Capitol Extension Room E2.010)
This article appears in November 15 • 2024.
