Zeina Hashem Beck is a prize-winning Lebanese writer and the author of two poetry chapbooks and three poetry collections. Her most recent collection, O, was published by Penguin Poets to critical acclaim, won the 2023 Arab American Book Award, and was named a Best Book of the Year by Lit Hub and New York Public Library. Poet Ilya Kaminsky wrote, “Listen. Her O brims with the world,” and NPR called it “graceful in [its] defiance.” Zeina’s work has appeared in The New York Times, LARB, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Nation, among others. She invented The Duet, a bilingual poetic form in which Arabic and English exist separately and in conversation with each other. Her previous full-length collections are Louder than Hearts (Bauhan Publishing, 2017) and To Live in Autumn (The Backwaters Press, 2014), as well as two chapbooks: 3arabi Song (Rattle, 2016) and There Was and How Much There Was (smith|doorstop, 2016). Her poem “Maqam” won Poetry’s 2017 Frederick Bock Prize. Educated in Arabic, English, and French, Zeina has a BA and an MA in English Literature from the American University of Beirut. She’s the co-editor, with Hala Alyan, of We Call to the Eye & the Night, an anthology of love poems by Anglophone poets of Arab heritage. She’s the co-creator and co-host of Maqsouda, a podcast in Arabic about Arabic poetry. After a lifetime in Lebanon and a decade in Dubai, Zeina recently moved to California with her husband and two daughters.
