Fady Joudah
American poet
Fady Joudah (born 1971) is a Palestinian American poet, translator, and physician. His debut collection, The Earth in the Attic, won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets series. He has translated poetry by Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Zaqtan; his translation of Zaqtan's Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me won the 2013 International Griffin Poetry Prize. Joudah's collection [...] was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry and won the 2025 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.
Life
Joudah was born in Austin, Texas, in 1971 to Palestinian refugee parents, and grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia. He returned to the U.S. for college, attended the University of Georgia and the Medical College of Georgia, and completed medical training at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. He is based in Houston, where he practices internal medicine. He has also worked with Doctors Without Borders.
Joudah translated The Butterfly's Burden, a collection of recent poems by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. The book won the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation and was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5429289. VIAF identifies the subject as 76298108. The Library of Congress control number is n2006001502. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1971, 2007, 2013 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fady Joudah” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.