Hayan Charara was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1972, to Arab immigrants from Lebanon.  He is author of  The Alchemist's Diary (Hanging Loose, 2001) and The Sadness of Others (Carnegie Mellon, 2006), nominated for the National Book Award. His awards include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lucille Joy Prize for Poetry, and a New Voices Award Honor for a children's book, The Three Lucys, forthcoming from Lee & Low Books. His poems have been translated into French and Arabic and  nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He is the editor of Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry (University of Arkansas, 2008). He is the president of the Radius of Arab American Writers and currently divides his time between Houston, where he lives with his wife and two sons, and San Antonio where he teaches poetry writing, literature, and theory at Our Lady of the Lake University.

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