Ahmad Almallah is a poet, artist, and educator. He grew up in Bethlehem, Palestine, and is now an artist-in-residence in Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. His poetry collections—Bitter English (2019), Border Wisdom (2023), and his most recent, Wrong Winds (2025)—explore themes of language, exile, and belonging. Almallah currently lives in West Philadelphia.
Harper Lower: Had you given thought to being a poet before coming to Philly? What was your writing career like then?
Ahmad Almallah: I’ve always given thought to being a poet, since I was very young. But I wanted to be a poet in Arabic. I’ve been in West Philly for maybe eight years now. I wrote all my books in West Philly and established myself as a poet here. But there was a period of ten years where I couldn’t go back to Palestine. When I finally went back, I found that my Arabic poems were so textual because I was writing on meter. I also realized that my parents have grown, and my mother was dealing with Alzheimer’s. I wanted to reclaim the memories, but my mother’s memory was working in opposition to my attempt to reclaim them. I felt that when I came back, I couldn’t sustain writing in Arabic as a way of putting these memories down. I made a clear decision then to start writing in English.
HL: Wrong Winds, which came out this year, is your third book. How did Wrong Winds compare to the publishing process of your first and second books?
AA: Wrong Winds was an exceptional experience because it had to deal with the genocide in Gaza. At a certain point, I had a lot of trouble here at Penn, especially related to my activism for Palestine and my reaction to what was happening as a Palestinian. There was a lot of doxxing. There were a lot of threats and discomfort. So, I was given a leave to just get out of the scene because it became too much, and I ended up going to Spain for that leave, where I realized I was so geographically close to Palestine that I wanted to go there. So, I booked a ticket two weeks in advance. I had many notebooks with me. Basically, I wrote Wrong Winds in two weeks. I was not sleeping. I was just working around the clock. I was taking from the notebooks, and I was writing new things. Taking a hook, a line. It really came about in 14 days, which was completely unexpected to me. It just came out of nowhere.
Even publishing it was kind of exceptional because the editor, Adie Steckel, (they’re one of my favorite people in the world right now), they were asked in an interview, ‘What have you been reading? What do you recommend?’ and they highly recommended, ‘Border Wisdom’ [Almallah’s second book]. When I found out about this, I just sent them a note, ‘are you interested in looking at my new manuscript?’ I sent the manuscript [for Wrong Winds], and within a week, they were like, “yeah, I would love to publish it.” Usually, there’s a year or so of a wait, but this, to them, seemed urgent, so they really sped up the process.
HL: Would you walk me through the process of writing a poem? Where do you usually start, and how do you know when a poem is done?
AA: I don’t have a specific process right now. When I was writing Bitter English [Almallah’s first book], it was very intentional. It involved a strict morning routine. But, after a while, I felt like I was repeating myself. Now I am more open to writing accidentally here and there. I don’t go to the page to write a poem. Recently, I’ve been writing on bar coasters. I find myself writing on paper cups sometimes. I still have a notebook, but I have been adopting this new method of just writing in the most unexpected places and scribbling a lot. That is more interesting to me right now. I mean, this idea that writing poems is work, or you have to do it day after day, I think it’s oppressive after a while. And, if you allow me to say, I feel like it’s kind of an American attitude towards writing. I don’t believe in that anymore. If it becomes a rigid routine and it becomes like work, it doesn’t serve the creative mind.
I write a lot about my mother, and there’s a book that I’m trying to work on called Her Book of Recipes, because when I came to the United States, she wrote down recipes for me. I feel cooking inspires my writing a lot. When you’re doing things like cooking or doing the dishes, if you pay attention to what your mind is doing in these moments–these interruptions of the usual human interaction–you get a lot of interesting ideas. Poems are all about these moments of the interruption of the familiar. You can just pay attention to yourself noticing things. I say to my students, ‘Listen to the objects around you. What could they be whispering to you if you listened to them?’ This is like collecting scraps, like the coaster. And when I want to transform them into a collection, I go back to these scraps, and I’ll spread them on the floor or a big table. I would take this, you know, [Almallah picks up a coaster he has brought from his office] from the scraps, and I would think, ‘this is interesting; this can be put here.’ This is how I keep my writing to myself. I keep it fresh, and I keep it a creative act.
HL: Can you share a poem or poet that changed how you think about language or identity?
AA: I’m a fan of Emily Dickinson. She wrote on scraps of paper, and sometimes she would cut the piece of paper into a certain shape and write along the edges of it. She worked a lot with envelopes, too, because she wrote a lot of letters. And when you see her envelope poems, just the way that she organizes the things on the envelopes, it is very different from the authoritative collection of how the poems were made into stanzas, and into the poems that we are used to. I also find Emily Dickinson interesting because I don’t think she actually works with the poem as a form. She works more with the line. She was interested in getting to the surprising line. When I was reading Emily Dickinson, I noticed that. I would read until I got to the line that gives you this jolt. That’s all you need.
HL: How do you navigate tension between artistic expression in your poetry and political responsibility?
AA: Tension is the most important thing in writing. When you get to publishing a book, there is no way to escape exploring tension. A book is a product of the culture, so it becomes necessary to explore the different tensions on yourself as a writer. As you’re trying to place this product in the world, too, the world wants to reduce you to certain labels, and I work a lot against that. I challenge it. I try not to ignore it either. I sometimes very openly comment on it.
Border Wisdom is full of subsections. They’re exploring that tension of my awareness of my place in the world. I worked that tension into Border Wisdom through a text that I wrote in Arabic after my mother passed away. I put it into the text to be more visual, but I didn’t like that. I felt like I was presenting an exotic text. Then I wanted to translate it, but I figured the best way of presenting this text is to explore its tension with the world. So, I started a process I call ‘mistranslating the text in Arabic.’ Within the mistranslation, I was commenting a lot on the expectations of the culture, from me as a Palestinian poet. What came out is an adjacent text in English to the Arabic, which captured the poetic essence of the piece, without translating it directly.
HL: Do you think that poetry allows you to access that human experience more than prose or journalism?
AA: Absolutely. I think poetry is very accurate in capturing experience through language. It’s so dense and intense that there is room for transferring the human experience. That’s what attracted me to poetry. When I’m constructing a poem, I’m not just putting words together, I’m creating the words as an object that speaks to the experience. That makes it more powerful and more accurate in transferring the intensity of the moment.
HL: Do you believe that there was maybe a moment, a person, or an event that made you realize that poetry would be so central to your life?
AA: Well, my mother. Unfortunately, my mother was struggling with Alzheimer’s, and she didn’t get to read my poems as an adult. But she got to read a lot of my poems in Arabic when I was a kid. Despite the fact that she was not well and her memories were disappearing, in one of our last conversations that made sense to me, she said, in Arabic, this one line, that was essential life advice from her, and it changed my entire life: “Ahmad, make something beautiful.”
To purchase a copy, you can find Ahmad Almallah’s most recent book, Wrong Winds, HERE.
Harper Lower is a second-year student at Drexel University majoring in English with a concentration in Writing. She loves to read and write short stories in her free time.