Hala Alyan

Hala Alyan (born July 27, 1986) is a Palestinian-American writer, poet, and clinical psychologist who specializes in trauma, addiction, and cross-cultural behavior. Her writing covers aspects of identity and the effects of displacement, particularly within the Palestinian diaspora. She is also known for acting in the short films I Say Dust and Tallahassee (directed by Darine Hotait).

Biography
Hala Alyan was born in Carbondale, Illinois, on July 27, 1986. Her family lived in Kuwait after her birth but sought political asylum in the United States when Iraqi forces invaded the country.

She received her doctorate in clinical psychology at Rutgers University and is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Applied Psychology at New York University. She and her husband live in Brooklyn, New York.

Awards and works
Alyan's poems have been published in various journals and literary magazines including The New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Guernica, Jewish Currents among others.

In her first novel, Salt Houses, the Yacoub family is forced to leave their home in Nablus, Palestine in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967. They move to Kuwait City and reluctantly try and rebuild their life. But when Sadam Hussein invades Kuwait in 1990, the family again lose their home, their land and their story, scattering to Beirut, Paris, Boston and beyond.

In 2013, Alyan's poetry collection, Atrium, received an award from the Arab American National Museum. In 2018, she won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, an award given to writers whose writing is believed to promote peace. She was also a visiting fellow at the American Library in Paris in the fall of 2018.

Her second novel, The Arsonists' City, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on March 9, 2021 to critical acclaim. The novel is about the Nasr family, which reunites in Beirut to discuss the family patriarch's will, revealing family secrets and the impact of war and violence on the family.

Novels

 * Salt Houses (2017)
 * The Arsonists' City (2021)

Poetry

 * Collections
 * Atrium (2005)
 * Four Cities (2015)
 * Hijra (2016)
 * The Twenty-Ninth Year (2019)
 * The Moon That Turns You Back (forthcoming March 2024)


 * Anthologies
 * We Call to the Eye & the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage (2023) edited by Hala Alyan & Zeina Hashem Beck

Essays

 * "'I am not there and I am not here': a Palestinian American poet on bearing witness to atrocity" in The Guardian (January 28, 2024)
 * "The Power of Changing Your Mind" in TIME (January 17, 2024)
 * "What a Palestinian-American Wants You To Know about Dehumanization" in Teen Vogue (December 20, 2023)
 * If Palestinian Freedom Makes You Uneasy, Ask Yourself Why" in The New York Times (November 1, 2023)
 * "The Palestine Double Standard" in The New York Times (October 25, 2023)
 * A Letter to My Husband" in Emergency Magazine (January 21, 2019)
 * "In Dust," essay appearing in Being Palestinian: Personal Reflections on Palestinian Identity in the Diaspora, edited by Yasir Suleiman (2016)