Kareem James Abu-Zeid

Kareem James Abu-Zeid (born 1981) is an Egyptian-American translator, editor, and writer. He was born in Kuwait and grew up in the Middle East. He studied European languages at Princeton University, taking translation workshops under poets CK Williams and Paul Muldoon. He then lived an itinerant life around Europe and the Middle East for several years, before moving to California for graduate studies. He obtained a Masters and a PhD in comparative literature from UC Berkeley, with a dissertation focusing on modern poetry as spiritual practice. He has taught university courses in writing, language, literature, and philosophy in four different languages at Berkeley, Mannheim and Heidelberg, and currently works as a freelance translator from Arabic, French, and German into English, as well as a freelance editor of English-language texts. He also does a significant amount of work editing the translations of other translators.

A highly regarded translator of modern Arabic literature, Abu-Zeid has the following books to his name:

• Confessions by Rabee Jaber (New Directions, 2016), winner of PEN Center USA's Translation Prize and finalist for the PEN America Translation Prize
• Nothing More to Lose: Selected Poems by Najwan Darwish (New York Review Books, 2014), winner of the Northern California Book Award.
• The Iraqi Nights by Dunya Mikhail (New Directions, 2014)
• The Mehlis Report by Rabee Jaber (New Directions, 2013)
• Confessions by Rabee Jaber (New Directions, 2016)
• Cities without Palms by Tarek Eltayeb (AUC Press, 2009, runner-up for the Banipal Prize)
• The Palm House by Tarek Eltayeb (AUC Press, 2012)

He contributes regularly to literary journals and websites such as Words Without Borders, Guernica, and Three Percent. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts translation grant, literary residencies from the Lannan Foundation and the Banff Centre for the Arts, as well as Poetry magazine's 2014 translation prize, a Fulbright Fellowship and Fulbright Enterprise Scholarship in 2003/4 in Germany, and a CASA Fellowship at the American University in Cairo.^[1][2] His personal website is www.kareemjamesabuzeid.com.

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