Mohja Kahf

Hagar Poems won honorable mention in the 2017 Book Awards of the Arab American National Museum. Kahf won a Pushcart Prize for her creative nonfiction essay, “The Caul of Inshallah,” about the difficult birth of her son, first published in River Teeth in 2010. Kahf’s first book of poetry, E-mails From Scheherazad, was a finalist for the 2004 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf was a “One Book” reading at Indiana University East (Richmond, Indiana) in 2017. The novel was chosen as Book Sense Reading Group Favorite for June 2007 and as book of the year for the One Book, One Bloomington Series by the Bloomington Arts Council, Monroe County Public Library, Bloomington, Indiana, 2008. Kahf won the Arkansas Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship in 2002 for poetry.

In 2004, Kahf had a column exploring sexual topics on the progressive Muslim website MuslimWakeUp!.com. The column was called “Sex and the Umma” and featured short stories by Kahf, who also hosted guest writers on the column, including Randa Jarrar, Michael Muhammad Knight, and Laila Al-Marayati. The original first column published, a short story by Kahf, “Lustrous Companions,” was later re-published on the website Love,Inshallah.com. Kahf’s work on “Sex and the Umma” “earned her a torrent of attacks…the author, though at once playful and mischievous verbally and thematically, seems to be putting across an alternative image of Islam…a more progressive…one” says Layla Maleh.

During her work at Rutgers, Kahf taught theories of feminism, Palestinian resistance women, and Black Power movement women. After her move to Arkansas, Kahf served for a time on the board of the Ozark Poets and Writers Collective, participated in local poetry slams and, after winning a spot on “Team Ozarks” with Brenda Moossy, Lisa Martinovic, and Pat Jackson, represented the region with the all-women team at the 1999 National Poetry Slam in Chicago,

Kahf was a founding member of RAWI, the Radius of Arab American Writers, established in 1993 Kahf is currently a member of the Syrian Nonviolence Movement. In 2011, Kahf and her daughter visited the Turkish border to Syria in order to work with Syrian escapees. Kahf wrote about the experience in the essay “The Daughter’s Road to Syria.”

Kahf graduated from Douglass College in 1988 and later received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in 1994. In 1995 she became a professor at the University of Arkansas where she serves in the Program for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, and is a faculty member in the King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.

Kahf was born in Damascus, Syria. In March, 1971, at the age of three and a half, she moved to the United States. She grew up in a devout Muslim household. Both Kahf’s parents came to the United States as students at the University of Utah. Kahf and her family moved to Indiana after her parents received their university degrees. When she was in the tenth grade, she and her family moved to New Jersey. In 1984, Kahf lived in Iraq for a brief time. During college, Kahf did one semester as a visiting student at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Mohja Kahf (Arabic: مهجة كهف ‎, born 1967) is an Syrian-American poet, novelist, and professor.

Her maternal grandfather was a member of the Syrian parliament in the 1950s, but was exiled from Syria because of his opposition to the Baathist regime. Her father was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that was banned in Syria, and was exiled from Syria as a result.