NYE, Naomi Shihab 1952-

PERSONAL: Born March 12, 1952, in St. Louis, MO; daughter of Aziz (a journalist) and Miriam Naomi (a Montessori teacher; maiden name, Allwardt) Shihab; married Michael Nye (a lawyer and photographer), September 2, 1978; children: Madison Cloudfeather (son). Ethnicity: "Arab-American." Education: Trinity University (San Antonio, TX), B.A. (English and world religions; summa cum laude), 1974. Politics: Independent. Religion: "Ecumenical." Hobbies and other interests: Traveling, reading, cooking, gardening, bicycling, watching basketball.

ADDRESSES: Home—806 South Main Ave., San Antonio, TX 78204. E-mail—nshihab@aol.com.

CAREER: Freelance writer, editor, and speaker, 1974—; Texas Commission on the Arts' Writers in the Schools Project, affilate, 1974-86. Holloway Lecturer, University of California, Berkeley; visiting writer at University of Hawaii, 1991, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, 1994, and University of Texas at Austin, 1995 and 2001; U.S. Information Agency Arts America Program, traveling writer and workshop leader. Poetry editor for Texas Observer; translator for Project of Translation from Arabic Literature (PROTA). Member of national council, National Endowment for the Humanities. Featured on eight-part Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television special The Language of Life with Bill Moyers, 1995, on PBS series The United States of Poetry, and on National Public Radio.

MEMBER: Poets and Writers, Radius of Arab-American Writers, Texas Institute of Letters, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Voertman Poetry Prize, Texas Institute of Letters, 1980, for Different Ways to Pray, and 1982, for Hugging the Jukebox; Hugging the Jukebox named a notable book of 1982, American Library Association (ALA); four Pushcart poetry prizes; I. B. Lavan Award, Academy of American Poets, 1988; Charity Randall Prize for Spoken Poetry (with Galway Kinnell), International Poetry Forum, 1988; Jane Addams Children's Book Award, and Honorary Book designation, National Association for Christians and Jews, both 1992, both for This Same Sky; Best Book citation, School Library Journal, and Pick of the List citation from American Booksellers Association, both 1994, and Notable Children's Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies citation, National Council for the Social Studies/Children's Book Council, and Jane Addams Children's Book Award, both 1995, all for Sitti's Secrets; Judy Lopez Memorial Award for children's literature, and Texas Institute of Letters Best Book for Young Readers, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children's Book Award Master List honoree, 1998, all for Habibi; Paterson Poetry Prize, for The Tree Is Older Than You Are; Guggenheim Fellowship, 1997; Witter Bynner Fellowship, U.S. Library of Congress, 2000; Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, 2000, for Come with Me: Poems for a Journey; National Book Award finalist in young people's literature category, 2002, for Nineteen Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East; Lannan fellowship, 2003.

WRITINGS:

POETRY; EXCEPT AS NOTED

Different Ways to Pray, Breitenbush (Portland, OR), 1980.

On the Edge of the Sky, Iguana Press (Madison, WI), 1981.

Hugging the Jukebox, Dutton (New York, NY), 1982.

Yellow Glove, Breitenbush (Portland, OR), 1986.

Invisible, Trilobite (Denton, TX), 1987.

Mint (prose; also see below), State Street Press (Brockport, NY), 1991.

Red Suitcase, BOA Editions (Rochester, NY), 1994.

Words under the Words: Selected Poems, Far Corner Books (Portland, OR), 1995.

Fuel, BOA Editions (Rochester, NY), 1998.

Mint Snowball (prose; includes selections previously published in Mint), Anhinga Press (Tallahassee, FL), 2001.

POETRY FOR CHILDREN

(Editor) This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from around the World, Four Winds Press (New York, NY), 1992.

(Editor) The Tree Is Older Than You Are: Poems and Stories from Mexico, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1995.

(Editor, with Paul Janeczko) I Feel a Little Jumpy around You: A Book of Her Poems and His Poems Collected in Pairs, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1996.

(With others) The Space between Our Footsteps: Poems and Paintings from the Middle East, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1998, published as The Flag of Childhood: Poems from the Middle East, Aladdin (New York, NY), 2002.

(Selector) What Have You Lost? (young-adult poetry), with photographs by husband, Michael Nye, Greenwillow Books (New York, NY), 1999.

(Selector) Salting the Ocean: 100 Poems by Young Poets, illustrated by Ashley Bryan, Greenwillow Books (New York, NY), 2000.

Come with Me: Poems for a Journey, with images by Dan Yaccarino, Greenwillow Books (New York, NY), 2000.

Nineteen Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, Greenwillow Books (New York, NY), 2002.

Is This Forever, or What? Poems and Paintings from Texas, Greenwillow Books (New York, NY), 2004.

Sweet Sifter in Time: Poems for Girls, illustrated by Terre Maher, Greenwillow Books (New York, NY), 2005.

PICTURE BOOKS

Sitti's Secrets, illustrated by Nancy Carpenter, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1994.

Benito's Dream Bottle, illustrated by Yu Cha Pak, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1995.

Lullaby Raft, illustrated by Vivienne Flesher, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1997.

Baby Radar, illustrated by Nancy Carpenter, Greenwillow Books (New York, NY), 2003.

OTHER

Never in a Hurry (essays; for yung adults), University of South Carolina Press (Columbia, SC), 1996.

Habibi (novel; for young adults), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1996.

Also author of chapbooks Tattooed Feet, 1977, and Eye-to-Eye, 1978. Contributor to Texas Poets in Concert: A Quartet, edited by Richard B. Sale, University of North Texas Press, 1990, and Best American Essays 1991, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Contributor of poems, stories, and essays to periodicals, including Atlantic, Iowa Review, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Atlanta Review, Indiana Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, Manoa, Houston Chronicle, and Austin Chronicle.

Recordings include Rutabaga-Roo (songs), Flying Cat (San Antonio, TX), 1979; Lullaby Raft, Flying Cat (San Antonio, TX), 1981; and The Spoken Page (poetry reading), International Poetry Forum (Pittsburgh, PA), 1988.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A novel titled Florrie Will Do It; new poems, essays, and picture books.

SIDELIGHTS: Naomi Shihab Nye is known for award-winning poetry that lends a fresh perspective to ordinary events, people, and objects. "For me the primary source of poetry has always been local life, random characters met on the streets, our own ancestry sifting down to us through small essential daily tasks," Nye was quoted by Jane L. Tanner in an essay for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Characterizing Nye's "prolific canon" in Contemporary Women Poets, Paul Christensen noted that Nye "is building a reputation . . . as the voice of childhood in America, the voice of the girl at the age of daring exploration." Nye's poetry is also informed by her Palestinian-American background, as well as by other cultures. In her work, according to Tanner, "Nye observes the business of living and the continuity among all the world's inhabitants. . . . She is international in scope and internal in focus."

Nye is also considered one of the leading figures in the poetry of the American Southwest, especially poetry expressing a woman's point of view. A contributor to Contemporary Poets wrote that she "brings attention to the female as a humorous, wry creature with brisk, hard intelligence and a sense of personal freedom unheard of" in the trying history of pioneer women.

Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Palestinian father and an American mother of German and Swiss descent. As a young girl she read voraciously and listened to her father's stories about his homeland and family. She began writing poems at age six and had them published in a children's magazine at age seven. After spending much of her childhood in St. Louis, Nye moved with her family to Jerusalem, which was then part of Jordan. Nye attended a year of high school in Jordan before her family moved to San Antonio, Texas, where the poet continues to live with her husband and son. "My poems and stories often begin with the voices of our neighbors, mostly Mexican American, always inventive and surprising," Nye wrote in a press release for Four Winds Press. "I never get tired of mixtures." A contributor to Contemporary Southern Writers wrote that Nye's poetry "is playfully and imaginatively instructive, borrows from Eastern and Middle Eastern and Native American religions, and resembles the meditative poetry of William Stafford, Wallace Stevens, and Gary Snyder."

Nye's earliest published work includes a 1977 chapbook titled Tattooed Feet; another chapbook, Eyeto-Eye, followed in 1978. The early poems contained in these books, written in free verse, often reflect the theme of a journey or quest. According to Tanner, "What is remarkable is Nye's ability to draw clear parallels between the ordinary and the sublime."

Nye told CA: "I have always loved the gaps, the spaces between things, as much as the things. I love staring, pondering, mulling, puttering. I love the times when someone or something is late—there's that rich possibility of noticing more, in the meantime.

"Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own."

In her first full-length collection, Different Ways to Pray, Nye explores the differences between, and shared experiences of, cultures from California to Texas, from South America to Mexico. In "Grandfather's Heaven," a child declares: "Grandma liked me even though my daddy was a Moslem." As Tanner observed, "with her acceptance of different 'ways to pray' is also Nye's growing awareness that living in the world can sometimes be difficult."

Nye followed Different Ways to Pray with On the Edge of the Sky, a slim volume printed on handmade paper, and Hugging the Jukebox, a full-length collection that also won the Voertman Poetry Prize. In Hugging the Jukebox, Nye continues to focus on the ordinary, on connections between diverse peoples, and on the perspectives of those in other lands. She writes: "We move forward, / confident we were born into a large family, / our brothers cover the earth." Nye creates poetry from everyday scenes in "The Trashpickers of San Antonio," where the trashpickers are "murmuring in a language soft as rags." The boy in the title poem "Hugging the Jukebox" is enthusiastic about the jukebox he adopts, singing its songs in a way that "strings a hundred passionate sentences in a single line."

Reviewers generally praised Hugging the Jukebox, noting Nye's warmth and celebratory tone. Writing in the Village Voice, Mary Logue commented that in Nye's poems about daily life, "sometimes the fabric is thin and the mundaneness of the action shows through. But, in an alchemical process of purification, Nye often pulls gold from the ordinary." According to Library Journal contributor David Kirby, the poet "seems to be in good, easy relation with the earth and its peoples." In Christensen's view, Nye "does not avoid the horrors of urban life, but she patches together the vision of simple nature struggling up through the cracks of the city."

Unlike her earlier work, the poems in Yellow Glove present a more mature perspective tempered by tragedy and sorrow. In this collection Nye considers the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in "Blood." She describes a café in combat-weary Beirut, bemoans "a world where no one saves anyone," and observes "The Gardener" for whom "everything she planted gave up under the ground." Georgia Review contributor Philip Booth declared that Nye brings "home to readers both how variously and how similarly all people live."

In addition to her poetry collections, Nye has produced fiction for children, poetry and song recordings, and poetry translations. She has also produced a book of essays, Never in a Hurry, published in 1996, and has edited several books of poems, including the award-winning anthology This Same Sky. In her introduction to This Same Sky, which represents the work of 129 poets from sixty-eight countries, Nye writes, "Whenever someone suggests 'how much is lost in translation!' I want to say, 'Perhaps—but how much is gained!'" A tremendous amount of work was involved in collecting these poems from around the world but, as Nye told a contributor to the Children's Literature Review, that "the poems ended up gathering themselves into sections that felt almost organic—related to family, or words and silences, or losses, or human mysteries. The sky seemed to occur surprisingly often as a universal reference point, which gave us the title."

Reviewers praised This Same Sky, which also includes country and poet indices as well as a map. These extras, according to Mary M. Burns in Horn Book, give "additional luster to a book which should prove invaluable for intercultural education." Although contributor Lauralyn Persson noted in School Library Journal that some of the poems in the collection would be better appreciated by adults, the reviewer added that the book is "brimming with much lovely material." Jim Morgan, in Voice of Youth Advocates, found the book's strongest characteristic to be its "sense of real human life behind the words" and a "universality of human concerns across cultures." Booklist critic Hazel Rochman called This Same Sky "an extraordinary anthology, not only in its global range . . . but also in the quality of the selections and the immediacy of their appeal."

Nye compiled and edited another anthology, The Tree Is Older Than You Are, which collects stories and poems from Nye's beloved Mexico, displaying them in both English and Spanish versions. Hazel Rochman, writing in Booklist, praised the "dreamy, lyrical writing with sudden leaps from the real to the magical." The 1996 collection I Feel a Little Jumpy around You combines 194 "his and her" poems, pairing a poem written by a man with one written by a woman for a lively poetic discussion of the differences between the genders and their perspectives on the world. Anthony Manna, in Voice of Youth Advocates, found the most intriguing aspect of the book to be "the degree to which the voices blend and gender boundaries give way to quests, quirks, and needs which signal the ties that bind us." The 1998 anthology The Space between Our Footsteps is a collection of the work of 127 contemporary Middle-Eastern poets and artists representing nineteen countries. Angela J. Reynolds in School Library Journal noted that "the universality of topics . . . gives insight into a culture and proves that differences are only skin deep."

Sitti's Secrets concerns an Arab-American child's relationship with her sitti—Arabic for grandmother—who lives in a Palestinian village. The child, Mona, recalls visiting Sitti in Palestine and how the two of them invented their own sign language to overcome the English-Arabic language barrier. When Mona returns to the United States, she sustains the bond with Sitti through her active imagination. Mona also writes a letter to the president of the United States, asking him for peace and informing him that she knows he would like her sitti a great deal if he were to meet her. Hazel Rochman, in Booklist, praised Nye for capturing the emotions of the "child who longs for a distant grandparent" as well as for writing a narrative that deals personally with Arabs and Arab Americans. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews asserted that Nye "deftly assembles particulars" of the relationship between grandmother and granddaughter and recounts incidents "with quiet eloquence."

Benito's Dream Bottle, a picture book for very young children, introduces the boy Benito, whose grandmother has stopped dreaming. He helps her fill up her "dream bottle," located between the stomach and the chest, with a world of sights and sounds so that she might dream again. Reviewers for Publishers Weekly and Booklist found the lists of images a bit overwhelming, but Judy Constantinides, in School Library Journal, called the book "inventive" and "lyrical."

In 1997 Nye published Habibi, her first young-adult novel. Readers meet Liyana Abboud, an Arab-American teen who moves with her family to her Palestinian father's native country during the 1970s, only to discover that the violence in Jerusalem has not yet abated. As Liyana notes, "in Jerusalem, so much old anger floated around . . . [that] the air felt stacked with weeping and raging and praying to God by all the different names." Autobiographical in its focus, Habibi was praised by Karen Leggett, who noted in the New York Times Book Review that the novel magnifies through the lens of adolescence "the joys and anxieties of growing up" and that Nye is "meticulously sensitive to this rainbow of emotion." Appraising Habibi in Horn Book, Jennifer M. Brabander agreed, saying, "The leisurely progression of the narrative matches the slow and stately pace of daily life" in Jerusalem "and the text's poetic turns of phrase accurately reflect Liyana's passion for words and language." As Nye explained to a Children's Literature Review contributor: "To counteract negative images conveyed by blazing headlines, writers must steadily transmit simple stories closer to heart and more common to everyday life. Then we will be doing our job."

What Have You Lost? contains 140 contemporary poems for young adults arranged by different themes of loss experienced over a person's lifetime. Written by mostly lesser-known poets, the poems, according to Jessica Roeder in Riverbank Review, take "a fresh look at this perennial theme," becoming "an exercise in expanding compassion." Hazel Rochman, in Booklist, pointed out that the book would be "a great stimulus for students' personal writing."

Come with Me: Poems for a Journey contains sixteen poems by Nye that are written for grade-school children and focus on journeys, both real and imaginary. A Publishers Weekly contributor found it "chock-full of unexpected images," and Shelle Rosenfeld, writing in Booklist, described Come with Me as ranging from "playful to pensive." Nina Lindsay, in School Library Journal, commented, "Each line exerts a pull like gravity."

Salting the Ocean is a collection of poems by children who have attended Nye's writing workshops over a twenty-five-year period. A contributor to Horn Book found that while some "occasionally catch fire," for the most part the poems are more imaginative word play than poetry. Linda Zoppa, in School Library Journal, said she enjoyed reading Nye's introduction in which the poet explained how she saved the poems over the years and eventually sought permission to print them from the adults who were once her students.

In her book of poetry Nineteen Varieties of Gazelle, Nye looks at the Middle East through her Palestinian-American poet's eye, recording the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and people she encounters, especially in Jerusalem, in a time of terror and struggle. Brabander said that young-adult readers familiar with Nye's Habibi and Sitti's Secrets will recognize the people and "will feel they are reading the grown-up Liyana's poetry." Nye allows readers a view into the lives of the many innocent people in the Middle East in a post-September 11 world. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews said that reading the poems will "elicit a gasp of surprise, a nod of the head, a pause to reflect," while Hazel Rochman concluded in Booklist, that Nineteen Variations of Gazelle "will spark discussion and bring readers up close" to what war and vengeance really mean. Nina Lindsay, in School Library Journal, observed that Nye's book is "a celebration of her heritage, and a call for peace."

Nye told CA: "As a child I became crucially aware of that sweet sliver of day called twilight. I would stand on our little front porch in St. Louis, gazing into the softening light, feeling hugely nostalgic, wanting to hang onto everything. Don't go so soon, something inside me implored. Everything passes before we are ready for it to pass. I'm not done with this day! Please stay.

"Listening to poems read by my mother created a savory, magical atmosphere, suspended in time. Read it again, I would beg her. When I could read for myself, I found my eyes traveling up and down a poem, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Rabindranath Tagore, William Blake—taking time with each word and phrase, floating peacefully in the beautiful space around the words on the page. Naturally, if one loved to read so much, writing became the automatic 'next activity'—the thank-you letter for all that had been given.

"My advice to anyone who asks for it remains the same for many years: Read, read, then read some more. Find a way to engage in regular daily writing. Consider it parallel to physical fitness. Writing in small blocks of time keeps us flexible, responsive, in tone and tune with muscular, vivid, energetic words.

"Then, find some way to share your work. Become involved in local writing circles, attend readings by writers. Make a system, a notebook, for yourself—where you might send your work, along with a self-addressed stamped envelope, that magical detail. Keep track of what you send where.

"And don't let 'rejections' trouble you too much—they are utterly inevitable, part of the process. Look at your work with a fresh eye when it comes winging home to you. Is there any way you could make it better?

"There is no end to the writing/reading life. It always feels like a beautiful, wildly mysterious beginning. That is the gift we are given, to see again and again."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Children's Literature Review, Volume 59, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2000.

Contemporary Poets, 7th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.

Contemporary Southern Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Contemporary Women Poets, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1997.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 120: American Poets since World War II, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992.

PERIODICALS

Book, September-October, 2002, review of Nineteen Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, p. 40.

Booklist, October 15, 1992, Hazel Rochman, review of This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from around the World, p. 425; March 15, 1994, Hazel Rochman, review of Sitti's Secrets, p. 1374; May 1, 1995, Hazel Rochman, review of Benito's Dream Bottle, p. 1580; September 15, 1995, Hazel Rochman, review of The Tree Is Older than You Are: Poems and Stories from Mexico, p. 151; September 15, 1997, Hazel Rochman, review of Habibi, p. 224; March 15, 1999, review of The Space between Our Footsteps: Poems and Paintings from the Middle East, p. 1297; April 1, 1999, Hazel Rochman, review of What Have You Lost?, p. 1397; October 15, 2000, Shelle Rosenfeld, review of Come with Me: Poems for a Journey, p. 442; December 1, 2000, review of Come with Me, p. 693; March 15, 2001, review of Salting the Ocean: 100 Poems by Young Poets, p. 1393; April 1, 2002, Hazel Rochman, review of Nineteen Varieties of Gazelle, p. 1315.

BookPage, April, 2002, review of Nineteen Varieties of Gazelle, p. 26.

Book Report, September, 1999, review of What Have You Lost?, p. 75.

Books for Keeps, March, 2002, review of The Space between Our Footsteps, Habibi, and Sitti's Secrets, p. 4.

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, March, 1994, p. 228; March, 1999, review of What Have You Lost?, p. 251.

Catholic Library World, September, 1999, review of Habibi, p. 19.

Chelsea, June 7, 1999, review of Fuel, p. 188.

Children's Book & Play Review, January, 2001, review of This Same Sky, p. 4.

Detroit Free Press, April 14, 2002, review of The Flag of Childhood: Poems from the Middle East, p. E5.

Five Owls, March, 2001, review of This Same Sky, p. 78.

Georgia Review, spring, 1989.

Horn Book, March-April, 1993, Mary M. Burns, review of This Same Sky, p. 215; May-June, 1994, Maeve Visser Knoth, review of Sitti's Secrets, p. 317-18; November-December, 1996, p. 755; November-December, 1997, Jennifer M. Brabander, review of Habibi, pp. 683-684; March, 1999, review of What Have You Lost?, p. 218; July, 2000, review of Salting the Ocean, p. 472; September-October, 2002, Jennifer M. Brabander, review of Nineteen Varieties of Gazelle, p. 591.

Junior Bookshelf, April, 1995, Marcus Crouch, review of Sitti's Secrets, p. 65-66.

Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 1994, review of Sitti's Secrets, p. 231; April 1, 1998; February 15, 1999, review of What Have You Lost?, p. 303; April 15, 2002, review of Nineteen Varieties of Gazelle, p. 575.

Kliatt, May, 1999, review of I Feel a Little Jumpy around You, p. 31; September, 1999, review of Habibi, p. 19.

Library Journal, August, 1982.

MELUS, summer, 2002, Joy Castro, "Nomad, Switchboard, Poet: Naomi Shihab Nye's Multicultural Literature for Young Readers: An Interview," p. 225.

New York Times Book Review, November 16, 1997, Karen Leggett, review of Habibi, p. 50; November 23, 1997.

Poetry, March, 1999, review of Fuel, p. 357.

Publishers Weekly, April 24, 1995, review of Benito's Dream Bottle, p. 71; May 13, 1996, p. 77; September 8, 1997, p. 77; March 8, 1999, review of What Have You Lost?, p. 70; September 4, 2000, review of Come with Me, p. 108; April 16, 2001, review of Mint Snowball, p. 60; February 18, 2002, review of The Flag of Childhood, p. 99.

Reading Teacher, February, 1999, review of Habibi, p. 504; September, 1999, review of The Space between Our Footsteps, p. 85; May, 2001, review of Come with Me, p. 824.

Riverbank Review, spring, 1999, Jessica Roeder, review of What Have You Lost?, pp. 42-43.

School Library Journal, December, 1992, Lauralyn Persson, review of This Same Sky, p. 139; June, 1994, Luann Toth, review of Sitti's Secrets, p. 112; June, 1995, Judy Constantinides, review of Benito's Dream Bottle, p. 94; September, 1997, Kate McClelland, review of Habibi, pp. 223-224; May, 1998, Angela J. Reynolds, review of The Space between Our Footsteps, p. 159; April, 1999, review of What Have You Lost?, p. 152; July, 2000, Linda Zoppa, review of Salting the Ocean, p. 120; September, 2000, Nina Lindsay, review of Come with Me, p. 221; May, 2002, Nina Lindsay, review of Nineteen Varieties of Gazelle, p. 175.

Teacher Librarian, May, 1999, review of What Have You Lost?, p. 45; February, 2001, review of Salting the Ocean, p. 26.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), March 31, 2002, review of Nineteen Varieties of Gazelle, p. 5.

Village Voice, January 18, 1983, p. 37.

Voice of Youth Advocates, April, 1993, Jim Morgan, review of This Same Sky, p. 59; August, 1996, Anthony Manna, review of I Feel a Little Jumpy around You, p. 178; February, 1999, review of The Space between Our Footsteps, p. 413; August, 2001, review of Salting the Ocean, p. 171.

Washington Post Book World, May 13, 2001, review of What Have You Lost?, p. 5.

ONLINE

Academy of American Poets Web site,http://www.poets.org/ (August 28, 2002), "Naomi Shihab Nye."

Anhinga Press Web site,http://www.anhinga.org/ (February 11, 2003).

Harper/Collins Children's Books,http://www.harperchildrens.com/ (February 11, 2003).

NewPages,http://www.newpages.com/ (February 11, 2003), Denise Bazzett, review of Mint Snowball.

Voices from the Gaps Web site,http://voices.cla.umn.edu/ (April 9, 1999), Mindy S. Howie, "Naomi Shihab Nye."*