Personal Info
- Country of residence: United States
Information
Ibtisam Barakat is a Palestinian-American writer, poet, and educator. She was born in Beit Hanina, near Jerusalem.
Barakat received her Bachelor's degree from Bir Zeit University, near Ramallah in the West Bank. In 1986, she moved to New York City, where she interned with The Nation magazine. She went on to earn a Masters degree in Journalism and Human Development and Family Studies from the University of Missouri.
Her childhood memoir, Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood, about growing up under Israeli occupation following the 1967 Six-Day War, was published in 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Source
Achievements and Awards
Her memoir, Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood (2007), received considerable critical acclaim, was chosen by Booklist as one of the Top Ten Biographies for Youth, received the 2008 International Reading Association’s Best Nonfiction Book Award for Children and Young Adults as well as the Arab American National Museum Book Award for Children’s Literature, and has been translated into several languages. Barakat’s stories and poems have been anthologized in Shattered (2002), The Flag of Childhood (2002, edited by Naomi Shihab Nye), Teaching Powerful Writing: 25 Read-Aloud Stories (2001), and elsewhere. In 1994 Barakat won the National Library of Poetry’s Outstanding Poetry Award.
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