Naomi Shihab Nye fulfills the old saying about not being born in Texas but getting here as fast as she could. Born in Missouri, raised in Jerusalem, in 1966 her family relocated to San Antonio. “My parents came here rather randomly,” she said. “They didn’t have jobs or anything set up, and it seemed a bit reckless to a teenager.”
Yet it was the move that defined her artistic and personal life. For even though the critically lauded poet has been acclaimed across the world, her connection to Texas and its possibilities has remained a constant throughout her writing life. Recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, at this week’s Texas Book Festival she will be honored with the 2024 Texas Writer Award, to which she said she was “deeply grateful and touched and shocked, because it’s been a wonderful thing being a writer in Texas.”
And that’s all of Texas. While she still lives in San Antonio, there’s scarcely a corner of the state she has not visited and written about in a career that explains why her parents made the choice to move here. “They saw Texas as a place that had room – room for them, room for many, a spaciousness of all kinds.” Since her early days traveling from town to town as a writer-in-schools with the Texas Commission on the Arts to her most recent signing tour for her latest books, “I never felt that I was not welcome because I was not from that town or even born in this state. I always felt a certain hospitality.”…