Tuffaha, Lena Khalaf

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, translator, and co-founder of the Institute for Middle East Understanding. She’s also the author of the poetry collections Water & Salt and Letters from the Interior, and the chapbook Arab in Newsland. She can claim the experiences of a first-generation American, immigrant, and expatriate, and has lived in and traveled across the Arab world. Many of her poems are inspired by the experience of crossing cultural, geographic, and political borders, borders between languages, and between the present and the living past.