Mohja Kahf

Winner of the 2020 Press 53 Award for Poetry

Mohja Kahf won the 2020 Press 53 Award for Poetry for My Lover Feeds Me Grapefruit and has been professor of comparative literature and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Arkansas since 1995. She is author of the novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, two other poetry collections, Hagar Poems and E-mails from Scheherazad, and a nonfiction work, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque. Her writing is available in Arabic, Turkish, Japanese, Italian, German, and French translations. She has won the Pushcart Prize and an Arkansas Arts Council Individual Artist Award. Kahf competed in the 1999 National Poetry Slam on Team Ozarks alongside the late Brenda Moossy. She is a founding member of the Radius of Arab American Writers and has served on the board of the Ozark Poets and Writers Collective in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Praise for My Lover Feeds Me Grapefruit

For so many years, Mohja Kahf's poems have been brightest beacons of light and clarity, a guiding force of goodness, richly woven, comforting fabrics of story, advocacy, and dazzling imaginative power—I bow to her grace and truth!

—Naomi Shihab Nye, author The Tiny Journalist

My Lover Feeds Me Grapefruit rakes along the skin like a soft touch exciting the nervous system. The juices of the language in these iridescent poems hint to the succulence of many fruits as Kahf beckons to lovers real and desired. The poems point to places in the body that cradle appetite, long for the syrup of the poetic Khoshaf that Khaf serves up throughout the collection.  The mixture of fruits of these poems is so sweet, they obliterate the harsh world outside of love and desire.  Each one is a salve that resides in the flesh and heart and shivers us into satisfaction.

—Elmaz Abinader, author of This House, My Bones

First poem from
My Lover Feeds Me Grapefruit

When I Come to You

When I come to you running
come to me sprinting
When I come to you smiling
come to me laughing
When I come to you dancing
come to me clapping and stamping
When I come to you clowning
cartwheel across the boardwalk to me
Do you know how long it’s taking
to learn this beautiful clumsiness?
When I come to you
rush to me, fly