Rachel Barenblat: Tell me a little bit about yourself and your background.

Nathalie Handal: I grew up in Europe, the United States and the Caribbean. My grandfather was born in Bethlehem and emigrated to the West in the early twentieth century, and my parents mainly grew up with a French education, and of course, with strong Christian Bethlehemite traditions, this was transmitted to me. When my parents left Europe and went to Boston I was about one or two. I spent many years in Boston before we left again for the French islands, and then eventually, I went back to study and live in Boston, France and much later on England. So I basically grew up with a strong French-American-Bethlehemite culture if I could put it that way…. I often go to Bethlehem and its narrow streets, stone houses, the olive trees, lemon trees, orange trees, the smell of rose wood in the prayer beads, the nativity church, constantly roams inside of me… even if it is a fragmented experience…

RB: How did The Poetry of Arab Women come into being?

NH: When I left the United States for Paris in 1992, I started to work more with the Arab world, and I soon realized that Arab women writers were marginalized in Arabic literature and the Arab literary scene. I also knew that in the United States, Arab-American women authors were one of the most invisible groups in the American literary circle. At the same time, Arab women writers were virtually unknown to Arab-Americans and Americans in general, and Arab-American women writers unknown to the Arabs. So it became very important for me to give birth to this project in order to eradicate invisibility, introduce Arab women poets and demonstrate the incredible diversity of Arab women's poetry. It was equally vital to unite these Arab women poets regardless of what language they wrote in and whether they were born in the Arab world or not. Hopefully, this anthology will be taught in schools, colleges and universities and will finally give Arab women poets the recognition they deserve.

RB: How did you find poets to solicit their work?

NH: A lot of research and lots of frustration… It was a real challenge to conduct research on Arab women poets writing today, gathering their poetic oeuvres and locating them personally. I went to as many cultural centers, consulates, libraries, bookstores, literary festivals, obtained as many newspapers and journals that I could, and contacted as many critics, translators, friends, and writers that I could.

In the Arab world, poets' publications are subsidy-based, so anyone can publish a book of poetry… you can imagine what I found, amazingly lengthy bibliographies of poetry books published by Arab women. And of course, I could not really base myself on these bibliographies because it is a subsidy-based publishing world. So I needed to discover, apart from the well-know poets, who were the women poets publishing and continuing to publish, was at the foreground of poetic activities and that critics were writing about.

Finding the poet's works and contacting them personally was extremely difficult. When I started researching, many Arab women poets living in the Arab world were still struggling with the fax. By the end of my research, though, not only were most of them more reachable, but some of them even had e-mail. The francophone poets I knew about because I lived in France and because the ones included are well-known in the French literary society. The other poets I discovered through a mixture of circumstances as my research brought me to them or they found their way to me. And of course, being in the United States I knew many Arab-American writers. By the end of the project it was astonishing how many new generation Arab-American women poets surfaced…