Author Spotlight:
Ruth Awad
As a poet, what is your goal, your hope in terms of your body
of work?
This is a lofty, lifelong goal, but I hope my work helps make
sense of the chaos and heartbreak and awe that surrounds us.
That’s at least what I’m trying to do.
How do place and family influence your work?
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I think you should always write about what matters to you.
So it makes sense that my family will keep showing up in and
influencing my work. They even influence what I don’t write,
at least for now. I try to be mindful of our collective
experiences and let them read drafts that share those
stories.
As for place, it’s hard to separate place from my point of
view. I grew up mostly in the Midwest, and the people and
attitudes of those places leave their fingerprints, even if
I’m not directly writing about them. And when I do I write
about specific places, I think of it like the establishing
shot of a film. It grounds the reader and gives texture.
Let’s bring that idea closer—how do you approach
understanding your intentions within a single poem?
I rarely start writing a poem without having a general
idea of what it’s about and what I’m trying to accomplish.
Revision is usually where I polish up that initial idea.
Moving further into the specific, we’d like to look at some
of the poetry featured in this edition of SHANTIH Journal.
In “Interview with My Father: Names,” the names of the dead
are written into slips of paper, which is both a literal
description of a ritual and a metaphorical transformation. In
“The Green Line,” bullet holes have mouths, Lebanon, a line
of broken vertebrae. What is caught in this exchange, the