Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is the author of three books of poetry: Something About Living (UAkron, 2024), winner of the 2024 National Book Award and winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry; Kaan & Her Sisters (Trio House Press, 2023), finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award and honorable mention for the 2024 Arab American Book Award; and Water & Salt (Red Hen, 2017), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award and honorable mention for the 2018 Arab American Award. Tuffaha is also the author of two chapbooks, Arab in Newsland (Two Sylvias Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Prize, and Letters from the Interior (Diode, 2019), finalist for the 2020 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize.

On her most recent collection, the judges citation for the 2024 National Book Award reads, “Something About Living opens with a single bird and ends in a dazzling meteor shower, and in between lies something of a marvel—an electric and sobering song crackling with possibilities for a homeland fractured and besieged by Empire. Lena Khalaf Tuffaha writes, ‘Love is paying attention,’ and this impressive collection serves as a powerful exemplar of devotion—brilliantly rendered in surprising forms—and profoundly teaches us ‘a million ways to love.'”

Tuffaha was born in Seattle, Washington but raised in Saudi Arabia and Jordan. She has lived the experiences of first-generation American, immigrant, and expatriate. Her heritage is Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian, and she is fluent in both Arabic and English. She has lived in and traveled across the Arab world, and many of her poems are inspired by the experience of crossing cultural, geographic, and political borders, borders between languages, and borders between the present and the living past.

Her writing has appeared in journals including Los Angeles Review of Books, Michigan Quarterly Review, the Nation, Poets.org, Protean, Prairie Schooner, and many others. Tuffaha’s work has also been anthologized widely, including in The Long Devotion (Georgia Press), We Call to the Eye and the Night (Persea Press), and Gaza Unsilenced (Just World Books).