BIO

Laila Halaby is the author of two (Beacon Press) novels, Once in a Promised Land (voted one of the top 100 works of fiction in 2007 by the Washington Post, also a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selectionand West of the Jordan (winner of a PEN Beyond Margins award), a memoir, The Weight of Ghosts (Red Hen Press), and two collections of poetry, why an author writes to a guy holding a fish (2leaf Press) and my name on his tongue (Syracuse University Press).  Laila was the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship and holds two master’s degrees, in Near Eastern Languages and Culture from UCLA and in Counseling from Loyola Marymount University.  She works as a counselor in psychosocial oncology at the University of Arizona and also collaborates with communities and organizations to implement creative writing classes and other programming.

Photo by Joshua Pearson
Photo by Joshua Pearson

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