Born and raised in the West Texas desert town of El Paso, Marian Haddad earned her BA in Creative Writing as well as a Teacher's Certification in Secondary English from the University of Texas at El Paso. She then traveled to California and earned an MFA in Creative Writing at San Diego State University where she spent time as an associate editor for Poetry International and also acquired Ingram as the journal's distributor. While in San Diego, she was closely involved with the Border Voices Poetry Program, which brings highly renowned poets to SDSU, fosters poetry with the city's youth, and sponsors Telly-Award-Winning television interviews with well-known poets and students of poetry. She co-produced and moderated a number of the talk-shows currently running on San Diego's Instructional Television. She has also engaged in graduate work in the prose poem at Emerson College in Boston and was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to study philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.

Haddad's poetry and essays have appeared in various editions of The Rio Grande Review and Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders as well as The Texas Observer, Dark Horses, and San Diego Writers' Monthly. Her work has been anthologized in Milkweed Editions' Stories from Where We Live: The California Coast edited by Sara St. Antoine and in Is This Forever Or What: Poems and Paintings from Texas, edited by Naomi Shihab Nye, and published by Greenwillow Books. Additional poems and essays are forthcoming in anthologies entitled Arab American and Diaspora Literature, edited by Nathalie Handal and to be published by Interlink Publishing Group; Direct My Pen Eastward: Arab-American Women's Voices on Writing, edited by Susan Muaddi Darraj and to be published by Greenwood/Praeger; and San Antonio in Color (working title), forthcoming by Trinity University Press.

Her collection of poems, Somewhere between Mexico and a River Called Home was released July 11, 2004 and is available on Amazon.com, Pecan Grove Press at http://library.stmarytx.edu/pgpress/ and, in the near future, can be ordered through bookstores via their Books in Print list. She has compiled a chapbook entitled Saturn Falling Down, per the request of Texas Public Radio which printed a limited, signed edition. Her poem, We Are Born with Names has been incorporated into Dianne Monroe's theater production, Lost Recipes, "a love song of resistance" which combines the voices of multiple Arab-American and Jewish-American women writers; and her work was profiled multiple times on The Hallmark Channel, where she spoke on the effect multiculturalism has had on her writing.

Haddad currently teaches creative writing as a visiting writer in San Antonio schools and in continuing education workshops including, Writing Your Way into Healing: Finding Light in the Darkness of Cancer,

Death, and Aging and OASIS Workshops for the Elderly. She also instructs workshops for elementary through high school teachers on how to tap into students' creative voices; and she lectures on writing, culture and teaching as well as reads, speaks and/or holds visiting writerships at varied institutions across the country, including The Institute of Texan Cultures, The Little Carver Theater, San Antonio Ecumenical Council, The National Society of Arts and Letters, The University of Texas San Antonio, St. Mary's University, Tufts University, Texas A&M International University, and the ADC Conference in Washington, D.C. She holds readings across the country. Recent readings include a featured reading with Naomi Shihab Nye sponsored by Wings Press and a reading with Patricia Sarrafian Ward and Suhair Hammad, sponsored by the American-Arab Antidiscrimination Committee in Washington, D.C. She has worked in the Writers in the Community program (WIC) for Gemini Ink, often with behaviorally challenged or gifted and talented students. She edits poetry and creative non-fiction manuscripts; three books, two by Jan Lee Ande and one by Carol Barrett, have won The Ashland Poetry Prize and the Texas Review Poetry Prize. She conducts one-on-one or small group writing workshops with students ranging from 9 to 92, is a visiting writer in the schools, currently acting as Writer in Residence at St. Luke's Episcopal School in San Antonio. She also teaches creative writing and English at the university level at various institutions such as Our Lady of the Lake University's San Antonio campus and Northwest Vista College. Her works in progress include two children's books, a collection of essays, and two manuscripts of poetry.

Shems:What drew you to poetry?

When I was young, my mother used to have me write letters to my brother in Vietnam. I was six years old when he was there, and she couldn't speak or write in English, so she sat me down to make me write the letters for her, and she would have me translate from Arabic to English all she was saying. For instance, she would say, "The walls of the house are weeping for you." It was up to me to deliver the highly metaphoric language of her home country into the English in which the letter would be read and understood. She was my first teacher of figurative language and I adored knowing both languages, learning them simultaneously, after which I was exposed regularly to the Spanish language as we lived in El Paso, Texas, a border town a few miles from Juarez, Mexico. I think language is astonishing. I loved hearing that Al Cazar, the great Spanish castle really meant Al Casser. I was thrilled when my Spanish teacher said that the Spanish word Ojala was derived from when the Spaniards observed the Moors kneeling and praying to God, "Akhhhh, Allah!" That the Spanish word for zaytoon was azeituna, and that almojada was al mokhada, the pillow, and alberca was al berkee, the pool or body of water, pantalones was buntloon, and camisa was camise. Zabott was Zapata. I thought of the similarities that bound us through language. I found excitement in the possibility of words and how they could connect us, everywhere. How they could unfold truths, how they could, through the use of great and precise detail, paint a picture through language. How the lyricism in poetry was mimetic of musical cadences in song. How the arts are connected. I believe in what William Carlos Williams said about "the photographic eye" and seeing things through a lens, having a focus on all you see, ready to deliver the images in front of you in language as you would in a freeze frame, perhaps. And Robert Henri, the American painter, taught his students tenets of perspective and form that correlate and apply to writing. It's the arts. The way we look at things. The way we see. The way we slow down the world so others can stop for a second to see it. To document things. And in documenting them, we prove that they exist. Real or surreal, once they are written down, they simply ARE.

In addition, my father wrote Arabic poetry in form and meter and was constantly going about the house, quoting the words and rhythms. Or he'd have us sit around him at the kitchen table as he practiced delivering a poem he had written. He would deliver poems at many large family events: weddings, baptisms, a funeral. He taught me the sound that is endemic to poetry, the lyricism which is at the core of it.

So between my exposure, from my youth through my adulthood, to figurative language and classical Arabic poetry, I became enthralled by it, and it also became part of my daily fabric. It was much of who we were. It was the translation of tongues that was important. And it was keeping true to the meaning and the intent of what was being translated.

Shems: How many Arab-American poets are there?

Well, there is an increasing number of strong voices out in the world now. First and foremost, we have Naomi Shihab Nye; I would say the most highly read and recognized poet of Middle Eastern descent. She is born to a Palestinian father and writes with such grace about her experiences and observations in the old country, about her family members there, as well as writing about other subjects and topics. She is a poet of strongly positive voice, a necessary spirit in today's world. There are multiple writers including novelist, Diana Abu-Jaber, poets and anthologists including Nathalie Handal, Susan Muaddi-Darraj, Tony-Award-winning performance poet Suhair Hammad, Elmaz Abinader, and an astonishing voice by the name of Patricia Sarrafian Ward who just published a book about growing up in Lebanon, as she is part Lebanese, during the Civil War. Though there seems to be an influx of women Arab-American writers, there are also some wonderful male voices out there, including a poet by the name of Hayan Charara and also Greg Orfalea, while there are some newer voices who are still working on manuscripts or works-in-progress, including Assef Al-Jundi. My favorites also include the greats including Gibran Khalil Gibran and Mahmoud Darweesh, of course, as well as Adonis. And also, we are lucky to have Michel Moushabek of Interlink Publishing giving voice to many Arab-American writers and poets. Our culture and community is rich with talen, voices and outlets.

Shems: Are there any efforts that highlight Arab American poets as a group?

Yes, there is a wonderful organization by the name of RAWI (Radius of Arab American Writers) who is headed by Barbara Nimri Aziz. In addition, MIZNA is a wondrous literary journal that publishes not only Arab-American writers, but writers from other cultural background whose work has to do with pertinent Arab-American topics, as I understand it. There are great anthologies out on Arab-American writing including those by Nathalie Handal and a very fresh, hot-off-the-press anthology by Susan Muaddi Darraj entitled, Scheherazade's Legacy: Arab-American Women on Writing. Then there's always Naomi Shihab Nye's The Space between Our Footsteps, which is an anthology of poems and paintings by Middle Eastern writers.

Shems: What is keeping you busiest now?

My first full-length collection of poetry, Somewhere between Mexico and a River Called Home was recently published by Pecan Grove Press. It followed a chapbook (a shorter collection of poems), which was published at the request of Texas Public Radio in correlation with their Hands-On Poetry Workshops. The limited edition chapbook is entitled Saturn Falling Down and includes many mythical poems about the strength of women and their ability to bear children and perpetuate life and nurture others. The new full-length collection, Somewhere between Mexico and a River Called Home is comprised of four sections. The first section is entitled "House of Children" and includes poems honoring and revering parents, of course, these parents I speak of are mine, but they are also the readers' parents inasmuch as this is a universal happening, our parents, their meaning in our lives, their aging, and the difficulty with which we see them age, the cycle of ends and beginnings, the circle. The second section is the title section. It houses a multi-paged poem documenting my parents' and the family's story of emigration, of their arrival into a new country at an older age, them having had 8 children already, and then I was born in America. So I am in-between the two cultures. And in addition, I have espoused the Mexican culture, which has informed my being so much. This title poem documents my parents' hardships and successes in a new land. The third section is entitled, "Nawal" which is my oldest sister's name, and it documents her diagnosis of cancer, her chemo, her reactions to that, her ups, her downs, and finally her passing and our dealing with her absence. The final section takes us back to life. We begin with House of Children and the great fruitfulness in my parents' home, then we see their aging, their struggles and triumphs, and finally, the death of one of us, "and the unraveling begins." But I attempt to close in section four with a triumphal or resurrectional tone. The poems in this final segment of the book have to do with my dead grandmother's spirit blessing me, with a mythic character, Cypress, Daughter of Fertility who teaches her daughter "to balance water on her shoulder" and ends with a poem to the mountains of my birth, the West Texas Franklins, "I will come back to three moons and five suns ago / sleep in and on your belly / ten million stars flickering like Aztec tears in your skies." Even the dead spirits are flickering in the stars. Life to death, death to life.

Currently, I am busy with readings and book signings, as is endemic to the nature of a fresh book being released, but I love the fact that I am meeting different people all over the country and hearing their stories. And I am happy when they are eager to hear something that they might relate to in the works that we share with them. It's as if they are somehow looking for their stories in our own. We all search for commonality and confirmation, and I've always loved reading others' works and finding my Sitti there or my parents or my plight. Again, writing binds us. It shows us that our worlds are very much the same in many ways. So the readings and signings, right now, are what's keeping me busiest. I also am conducting workshops as a visiting writer in various institutions, some are middle school through high school classes, sometimes college level classes, sometimes workshops for the elderly, and sometimes one-on-one mentorships or tutorials in creative writing. I also love editing manuscripts that writers are in the midst of forming and preparing to submit for publication. So between the readings, lectures, book signings, teaching, and editing manuscripts, my plate is full of the things I love most: people and poetry and all that has to do with writing and reading.

Shems: What are some of your future projects?

I am currently working on a number of children's books, a few of which have to do with our Arab-American or immigrant culture. I also have two poetry collections in progress and am considering, though very much on the back burner, as there isn't enough time in the day, editing an anthology. Also, future readings and signings for Somewhere between Mexico and a River Called Home and visiting writerships at various institutions that will take me through 2005, and the works-in-progress will take years, as we know, from conception, to gestation, through many revisions, submissions, acceptances, more revisions and final publication.

Shems: Any advice for readers venturing out into poetry?

If you love it, do it. If it consumes you, do it. If you can't live without reading it, hearing it, writing it, do it. The advice is almost not necessary as in whether or not they should make the leap. The decision is made for them. It is a part of you. It has to happen. Once it happens, then listen to your inner voice. Philip Levine once said, and I'm paraphrasing, that we are the muse. That it's not a separate entity, but that the muse is us at our heightened attention. Attention is key. Attention to the world. To all that's in it. All the living and the dead and everything in-between. To have that photographic eye, to see through a framed lens, at angles, up and down and in-between. To turn things over and find what lies underneath. To be the voice of the moment, whatever moment you are at. To speak up and out. To listen to the music in words, to the cadences, to find images that leap, that are fresh. To discover your personal voice! To immerse yourself in others' voices and experience the rich diversity out there, the many writers and poets that are so distinctive. What makes them tick, what makes their sound. Find poets you relate to, that speak to you. Read them inside and out. Discover, through reading, writing. But also be attentive to the quietude of your personal voice. Or to the loudness of it. Be sensitive to all things that are out there to inform your existence and your poetics. To tell the truth. The truth is so compelling. For me, there is so much all around me in the real world, that I would not have time enough to document it all. If you love poetry, do it. If it feeds your spirit, do it. And your poems will find their way into the world when they are ready and when you are ready to send them into it. In writing poetry, listen. To the things that want to be said. Listen to the voice inside you.