Threa Almontaser

Threa Almontaser is a Yemeni American writer, translator, and multimedia artist from New York City. She holds an MFA from North Carolina State University.

Her first full-length poetry collection, The Wild Fox of Yemen (Graywolf Press, 2021), was selected by Harryette Mullen as the winner of the 2020 Walt Whitman Award, given by the Academy of American Poets and was long-listed for the 2021 National Book Award for Poetry. 

About The Wild Fox of Yemen, Mullen writes,

“The spirit of Whitman lives in these poems that sing and celebrate a vibrant, rebellious body with all its physical and spiritual entanglements. Formally and linguistically diverse, these bold, defiant declarations of ‘reckless’ embodiment acknowledge the self's nesting identities, proclaiming the individual's intricate relations to others, the one in the many and the many in the one. Ultimately, they ask how to belong to others without losing oneself, how to be faithful to oneself without forsaking others. Exuberant dialogues incorporate communities of known and unknown interlocutors along with translations of the Yemeni poet Abdullah Al-Baradouni.”

The recipient of 2021 Maya Angelou Book Award and the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, Almontaser teaches English to immigrants and refugees in Raleigh, North Carolina.