A Palestinian-American poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist, Hala Alyan was born in Carbondale, Illinois, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. She holds a BA from the American University of Beirut, an MA from Columbia University, and a PsyD from Rutgers University. Her poetry collections include Atrium (Three Rooms Press, 2012), winner of the 2013 Arab American Book Award; Four Cities (Black Lawrence Press, 2015); Hijra (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry; The Twenty-Ninth Year (Mariner Books, 2019); and The Moon That Turns You Back (Ecco, 2024). Her novel Salt Houses (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She received a Lannan Foundation Fellowship.
