Natalie Handal is an award-winning poet, playwright, and editor. She has lived in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Arab world. Her poetry collections include: The Neverfield, The Lives of Rain, shortlisted for The Agnes Lynch Starret Poetry Prize and the recipient of the Menada Literary Award, and Love and Strange Horses, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award 2011, and an Honorable Mention at the San Francisco Book Festival and the New England Book Festival. The New York Times says it is “a book that trembles with belonging (and longing).” She is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, a Fundación Araguaney Fellow, recipient of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature 2011, the AE Ventures Fellowship, an Honored Finalist for the 2009 Gift of Freedom Award, and was shortlisted for New London Writers Awards and The Arts Council of England Writers Awards. Handal was listed as one of the “100 Most Powerful Arab Women 2011” in a Special Report by ArabianBusiness.com. Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa writes: “This cosmopolitan voice belongs to the human family, and it luxuriates in crossing necessary borders.” Her new collection, Poet in Andalucía, is forthcoming in Spring 2012.

The Living Writers Reading Series is sponsored by the Siegfried B. & Elisabeth Mignon Puknat Fund, Porter College George Hitchcock Poetry Fund, Asian American/Pacific Islander Resource Center, Literature Department/Creative Writing Program, Laurie Sain Creative Writing Endowment, East Asian Studies Program, Bay Tree Bookstore, Latino and Latin American Studies Center, Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, El Centro, Cantu Queer Center, Chicano Latino Research Center, Stevenson College, Oakes College, and Merrill College.

Books are sold at the readings by The Bay Tree Bookstore.