Fady Joudah was born in Austin TX in 1971, the second of five children. His father was 14 in 1948 when he fled Palestine following the creation of the state of Israel. Joudah's mother, whose family hailed from the same village, was born in 1949 in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. Joudah's father eventually emigrated to the United States to finish a doctorate in history, returning to Gaza to marry Joudah's mother. The family moved to Austin, where the elder Joudah taught at the University of Texas for a year before accepting teaching positions first in Libya, then in Saudi Arabia, where Joudah attended junior high and high school.
His father introduced him early to classic Arabic poetry — reciting lines, talking about technique, linking those beloved poems with his own life as a boy. Joudah returned to the United States for college, attending the University of Georgia and joined the Veterans Affairs hospital in 2000 as a doctor of internal medicine.
He is also a field member of Doctors Without Borders since 2001. He spent two six-month missions— the first in Zambia (2002) and most recently in Darfur-Sudan (2005). He lives in Houston, TX, where he is an emergency-room physician at Houston's Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center.. He is also the translator of Mahmoud Darwish’s recent poetry The Butterfly’s Burden. His poetry has appeared (or will) in the Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Bellingham Review, and Crab Orchard, among many. Joudah is the first physician and the first Arab-American to receive the Yale Series of Younger Poets award.
Read Fady Joudah's "The Name of the Place" in the Poets Against the War newsletter here.
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