Hedy Habra

Hedy Habra is a poet, artist, and essayist, born in Egypt and of Lebanese descent. She has authored four poetry collections, most recently Or Did You Ever See The Other Side?, a collection of ekphrastic poems; also The Taste of the Earth, which won the 2020 Silver Nautilus Book Award, Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Best Book Award; Under Brushstrokes, another collection of ekphrastic poems, finalist for the 2015 International Book Award and the USA Best Book Award; and Tea in Heliopolis, which won the 2014 USA Best Book Award and was a finalist for the International Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the 2013 Arab American National Book Award Honorable Mention and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award and the USA Best Book Award. Her book of literary criticism, Mundos alternos y artísticos en Vargas Llosa (2012), explores the visual and inter-artistic elements of the Peruvian Nobel Laureate's fiction. Habra holds a BS in Pharmacy. She earned an MA and an MFA in English and an MA and Ph.D. in Spanish literature, all from Western Michigan University, where she has been teaching. A recipient of the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Award, the Victoria Urbano Award, and the Eve of St. Agnes Award, she won Honorable Mention from Tiferet and was a finalist for Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Award. A twenty-one-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, her multilingual work appears in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Bitter Oleander, California Quarterly, Cider Press Review, Cimarron Review, Cutthroat, The Cortland Review, Diode, The Ekphrastic Review, Gargoyle, The MacGuffin, MacQueen’s Quinterly, MockingHeart Review, New York Quarterly, Nimrod, Panoplyzine, Poet Lore, Pirene’s Fountain, SLANT, Solstice, Tiferet, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, Vox Populi, and World Literature Today.

Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? weaves a mystery about a mystery—the yearning and its fulfillment (or not) of any lived life. —Rebecca Foust

These poems confess that image can hide the smell of blood and the smell of jasmine, both the terrible and the sweet in the story of a place. —Traci Brimhall

The poems, in verse and prose, in Habra's new collection, Under Brushstrokes, pay homage to the transformative power of art in the most authentic way possible—by demonstrating it. —Stuart Dybek

Hedy Habra's hospitable poems, lush with intricate landscapes of relating and remembering, are so rich they make me homesick. —Naomi Shihab Nye

Praise for The Taste of the Earth

The Taste of the Earth contains numerous histories—from Egypt's distant past to the Lebanese Civil War to the Arab Spring—though history is not “the straight line that accompanies silence.” These poems confess that image can hide the smell of blood and the smell of jasmine, both the terrible and the sweet in the story of a place. Habra also teaches us that it is not just language and maps that tell history, but that objects carry what they have witnessed, the truths they are waiting to speak.

—Traci Brimhall, author of Saudade

In this lush collection, the force of the lyric brings imagination, witness, myth, and memory into an opulent confluence. With formal variation—from the Japanese haibun, to the Malay pantoum, to an abecedarian composed of Phoenician letters, to an intersection of the senses and mathematics via the Eye of Horus—Habra’s poems enact art as the process of “remembering and forgetting,/telling and retelling.” As the focus here, often, is war and its devastations, witnessed and remembered, The Taste of the Earth is rife with sorrow songs, but each is moored by the speaker as a beholder of earth’s beauty as it pours in through the senses and finds a home in language: “[T]he jacaranda’s blue light anchors me back,” Habra writes, “whispering, yes, it’s here, deep inside, fluttering like a dove’s wings.”

—Diane Seuss, author of Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl

These are a painter’s poems, sensuous and filled with scenes under the surface. In her journey, Hedy Habra digs into the roots to find stories of wisdom. What’s special about these stories is that, even though they are painful, their exotic flavor is of earth, which belongs to everyone. They wander through memory and, image by image, settle in the soul “as sand in an hourglass.”

—Dunya Mikhail, author of In Her Feminine Sign

You may be sitting in your favorite chair at home when you begin to read Hedy Habra’s latest collection of poems, The Taste of the Earth, but that’s not where you’ll be. You’ll be in Damascus, Heliopolis, Beirut, Aleppo. Before you know it, as if dreaming, you’ll be gliding along the streets of these cities, listening to their sounds, overhearing bits of conversation. Born in Egypt, Habra is part of the diaspora of Middle Easterners compelled to leave lands they love due to war and upheaval. There is longing for home in every sense of the word—for a place, a person, a taste, a story, a particular light, a language, a gesture, a laugh. It is this longing that makes these poems universal, regardless of where you are as you read them.

—Susan Azar Porterfield, winner of the Cider Press Review Editor’s Prize for Dirt, Root, Silk

Praise for Under Brushstrokes

Hedy Habra’s Under Brushstrokes is a rich tapestry of images, sounds and meanings. Like any tapestry the complexity of weaving, the craft and artistry are often under or subliminal to the larger images, and in this way the book lives up to its title in that there is so much foundation that goes into the building of an image and giving the image not only meanings but breath and life itself. Enjoy Under Brushstrokes, it is meant to be read and read again.

—J.P. Dancing Bear, Editor, The American Poetry Journal 

The poems in Hedy Habra’s Under Brushstrokes amount to something more sweeping than simple ekphrasis. She makes no attempt to describe works of art, but instead uses them as points of departure for explorations of the dreaming psyche. The resulting meditations, often adopting the genre of prose poetry, retain the colorful imagery we expect in visual art, expressed in a language as precise as it is vivid.

—Alfred Corn, author of Tables

Under Brushstrokes is an astonishing collection of poems responding to art. Through Habra’s accomplished pen, these ekphrastic poems create an immediate world of rich textures and image, giving the reader intimate access to such diverse talents as Klimt, Guccione, Bosch, Tanning, and Hokusai. She explores the stages of art—from thought to modeling to canvas—revealing the layered connections between the individual and art itself. These are poems of depth and skill, of beauty and paradox, of “words suffused / in linseed oil,” as Habra writes—a marvel of a work.

—Sam Rasnake, Editor, Blue Fifth Review

In the poem "Brushstrokes," Hedy Habra writes "the painter raises inexorably the level of the waters, and the woman knows . . . she will only be fulfilled by drowning in the torrent." The poems, in verse and prose, in Habra's new collection, Under Brushstrokes, pay homage to the transformative power of art in the most authentic way possible—by demonstrating it.

—Stuart Dybek, author of Ecstatic Cahoots and Paper Lantern

Praise for Tea in Heliopolis

The poems of Tea in Heliopolis form the story of a family, sometimes tragic, sometimes searingly beautiful, and always exotic, seen through the eyes of a painter. The trope of life, as moments flowing from the paintbrush wielded skillfully by a poet, allows Hedy Habra to capture details redolent of old masters, exquisite and visceral, and creates her remembered world with the wild imagination and color of a Van Gogh. Moving through life in Egypt, to Beirut, then to America, with a kind of post-Newtonian sense of everything happening simultaneously, the chronicle captures the bravery it takes to remember and yet experience a beauty transcendent to pain. This is a remarkable book of poetry.

—Diane Wakowski, author of Emerald Ice

Hedy Habra's hospitable poems, lush with intricate landscapes of relating and remembering, are so rich they make me homesick. Here are worlds, both ancient and modern, spun and sung in shining wonder.

—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Transfer

From Egypt to Lebanon to the freshwater coastline of Michigan, Hedy Habra's Tea in Heliopolis is a collection full of ancestral gestures, sensual imaginings, and songs turning unerringly into legend. Shapely, timeless lyrics that range from continent to continent, past to present, with a wisdom born of Rita Hayworth, African drums, and almond trees, Habra has a knack of turning phrases that make us reconsider our own place on earth. And in a prodigious and moving poem like "Raoucheh," she gives voice to a forcibly silenced people as only a true poet can. This is a necessary and rhapsodic book of poems.

—Ravi Shankar, author of Instrumentality

Tea in Heliopolis is an irresistible book, offering poems of exquisite charm and sensibility. Both cinematic and painterly, moving across vast swaths of ancient geography, Habra’s work brings to our senses the world of Lebanese parlors and Cairo streets, of women lost in prayers and men playing backgammon in tea houses, but she doesn’t stop there. With her wise and compassionate language she invites us to understand and share their lives. Cavafy and Adonis come to mind, but Habra is a poet uniquely herself. Led by her masterly pen we cannot help but respond to her invitation. Tea in Heliopolis takes you on a voyage richly textured with Old World mystery and New World urgency.

—Pablo Medina, author of Cubop City Blues