Hala Alyan

Palestinian American poet and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan was born in Carbondale, Illinois, and grew up in Kuwait, Oklahoma, Texas, Maine, and Lebanon. She earned a BA from the American University of Beirut and an MA from Columbia University. While completing her doctorate in clinical psychology from Rutgers University, she specialized in trauma and addiction work with various populations.

Alyan's poetry collections include Atrium (2012), winner of the 2013 Arab American Book Award in Poetry; Four Cities (2015); Hijra (2016), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry; and The Twenty-Ninth Year (2019). She is the author of the novels Salt Houses (2017) and The Arsonist's City (2021). She has been awarded a Lannan Foundation fellowship and lives in Manhattan.