Yahya Frederickson

Yahya Frederickson teaches writing and literature at Minnesota State University Moorhead. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana and a PhD in English from the University of North Dakota. Between graduate degrees he taught for six years in Yemen, initially as a Peace Corps Volunteer. He has served as a Fulbright Scholar in Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Kyrgyzstan.

He is the author of The Gold Shop of Ba-‘Ali, which won Lost Horse Press’s 2013 Idaho Prize. He’s also the author of four chapbooks. The latest chapbook, The Birds of Al-Merjeh Square: Poems from Syria, won the 2013 Open Chapbook Competition at Finishing Line Press. His other chapbooks are Month of Honey, Month of Missiles (Tigertail, 2009), Returning to Water (Dacotah Territory, 2006) and Trilogy (Dacotah Territory, 1985, with Julie Taylor and Richard Schetnan).

His poems have appeared in Arts & Letters, Black Warrior Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, Cream City Review, CutBank, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Flyway, Great River Review, Green Mountains Review, Hanging Loose, The Laurel Review, Midwestern Gothic, Mizna, Ninth Letter, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, Quarter After Eight, Quarterly West, The Southern Review, WLA, Water~Stone Review, Witness, and other journals.

His translations (with Muhammed Shoukany) of contemporary Saudi Arabian poets appear in New Voices of Arabia: The Poetry: An Anthology from Saudi Arabia (I.B. Tauris, 2012).