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Hala Alyan

Hala Alyan

“We're all raised on different stories and different narratives about ourselves, about people in the world, about who is safe, who is not safe, who is worthy of protection, who is worthy of being humanized. None of us are exempt from that. And it is our responsibility to start to investigate the narratives we've been told.”

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“Hala Alyan is a lyrical force, a much-needed Arab American voice.” —Etaf Rum, New York Times best-selling author of A Woman Is No Man

Hala Alyan is a licensed clinical psychologist, professor at New York University, and writer. Her work grapples heroically with themes of family, displacement, belonging, and what ‘home’ means. Of her work, author Fatimah Asghar writes, “I feel honored to be alive in a time where I can read Hala Alyan.”

Hala 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.

She is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize – of which Ru Freeman praises, “Hala Alyan shows how we carry our origins in our hearts wherever we may roam, and how that history is calibrated by the places we choose to put down roots. This is a book with the power to both break and mend your heart.” Her latest novel, The Arsonists’ City, was a finalist for the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, LitHub, The New York Times Book Review and elsewhere. Hala’s forthcoming poetry collection, The Moon That Turns You Back, will be published by Ecco this spring.

She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

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  • AANHPI
  • Cultural Criticism
  • Ethics
  • Fiction
  • Health & Wellness
  • Poetry
  • Social Justice

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Hala Alyan

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