Poet Naomi Shihab Nye honored for lifetime achievement with two awards

October has been a banner month for San Antonio poet Naomi Shihab Nye. The Texas Book Festival announced Nye as the recipient of its annual Texas Writer Award, and the Academy of American Poets has honored her with its Wallace Stevens Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Past recipients of the Texas Writer Award include Sandra Cisneros, Stephen Harrigan, Lawrence Wright and Dan Rather. Nye has previously received lifetime achievement awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, the National Book Critics Circle, and the Arab American Museum.

Harrigan said that while Nye’s status as an artist has been growing steadily over five decades of publishing poetry, fiction and literature for children, “with these two major awards, it looks like 2024 is the year her reputation approaches flood tide.”

What language gives

The Texas Writer Award will be presented at the Texas Book Festival in Austin on Saturday at 11 a.m., with a discussion moderated by author Carrie Fountain to follow.

“[Nye] is not only a profoundly gifted and accomplished writer, but also a dedicated educator and cherished figure in the Texas literary community,” said Hannah Gabel, the festival’s literary director.

Before her festival appearance, Nye will head to Georgia Tech University to teach a class. She said she’s grateful for the direct contact with students her life of teaching has fostered, in “talking to them about how language can help us, or how we question it, or what it can give us.”

Nye will also read from her new poetry volume Grace Notes from 3:15 p.m. to 4 p.m., followed by a discussion on poems about families. On Sunday at 1 p.m., Nye will present on I Know About a Thousand Things: The Writings of Ann Alejandro of Uvalde, Texas, which she edited with colleague Marion Winik, collecting writings of Alejandro, their friend and reluctant author who died in 2019 at age 64.

While the recent honors — including a $100,000 honorarium for the Wallace Stevens Award — are pleasing, “Awards have always sort of stunned me,” Nye said. “Writers and artists don’t do what we do for awards. That’s not our dream.”

But the lifetime achievement awards are different from book awards, she said. “An award to yourself for your work, it just makes me feel really humbled in light of everything people have been suffering in so many places in the world.”

‘Bearer of light and hope’

Born in St. Louis to a Palestinian father and American mother, Nye lived with her family in Ramallah, Palestine during high school. The family fled the Six-Day War in 1967 and relocated to San Antonio, where she graduated Lee High School before attending Trinity University.

San Antonio author John Phillip Santos said he first met Nye when she visited his class at Churchill High School to share her poetic sensibility. “It was the great serendipity of my writing life to meet Naomi,” he said. 

Santos, whom Nye has cited as an influence on her as a writer, said that for himself and other young Chicano poets, Nye’s audacity “was that she asserted and affirmed and manifested that we, as Palestinian American and Chicano poets, could speak to not just this community, but the nation and the world. That was an indispensable, irreplaceable gift.”

In announcing the lifetime achievement award, Afaa Michael Weaver, chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, said “Nye has borne witness to the complexities of cultural difference that connect us as human beings, evidencing a firm commitment to the poet as bearer of light and hope. In celebrating her Palestinian heritage with a gentle but unflinching commitment, her body of work is a rare and precious living entity in our time, when the tragic conflict between Gaza and Israel threatens to deepen wounds and resentments everywhere.”

Nye recently suffered the death of her mother Miriam Naomi Shihab, whose paintings hang around Nye’s home in the Arsenal neighborhood, followed by the death of the son she had with photographic artist Michael Nye, Madison Cloudfeather Nye.

Being a poet can help “leverage the heaviness of thought” that accompanies tragedy, she said. “I find myself always looking for a word or phrase to hold onto as a kind of rescue. … There’s a part of me that’s embracing words differently with all this catastrophe, and needing them and also appreciating them more.”

And the lifetime achievement award has spurred a renewed interest in Wallace Stevens, the poet for whom the award is named. Back in high school, she found his poems “mysterious but alluring,” she said.

Now at age 72, Nye hopes her own poetry evinces “an acknowledgment of mystery because even at this late date, there’s so much that remains inexplicable, so much I can’t fathom or I’ll never be able to explain or say that I understand.”