Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nyeis a poet, songwriter, and novelist. She was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother. Although she calls herself a "wandering poet", she refers to San Antonio as her home. She says a visit to her grandmother in the village of Sinjil was a life-changing experience. Nye was the recipient of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 March 1952
CountryUnited States of America
extend love means somebody whenever
I think whenever you love something or somebody it means that you have to extend yourself, you have to grow - get a little larger. You can't stay in your little comfortable - spot.
facts stories interest
Facts interest me less than the trailing smoke of stories.
meaningful perspective poetry
As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.
want
I want to be someone making music/with my coming.
mother father light
I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music - Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering 'The Lost Chord' on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.
girl jobs children
During the Gulf War, I remember two little third grade girls saying to me - after I read them some poems by writers in Iraq - 'You know, we never thought about there being children in Iraq before.' And I thought, 'Well those poems did their job, because now they'll think about everything a little bit differently.'
children fighting thinking
I keep thinking, we teach children to use language to solve their disputes. We teach them not to hit and fight and bite. Then look what adults do!
jobs believe writing
I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.
thinking
I do think that all of us think in poems.
humility class feelings
When allowed to return to the class, your feelings of humility and lonesomeness will render you a much finer student and person.
distance shoes world
our limbs which had already traveled far beyond her world, carrying the click of distances in the smooth, untroubled soles of their shoes.
why are we so monumentally slow?
sky wind cups
A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.
writing shining pleasure
The writing of Kathleen McGookey shines more brightly than most fine things we feel pleasure to read. Celebrate it!