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The Tiny Journalist

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“A moving testament to the impact one person can have and the devastating effects of occupation.”
—Washington Post Best Poetry Books of 2019

Internationally beloved poet Naomi Shihab Nye places her Palestinian American identity center stage in her latest full-length poetry collection for adults. The collection is inspired by the story of Janna Jihad Ayyad, the "Youngest Journalist in Palestine," who at age 7 began capturing videos of anti-occupation protests using her mother's smartphone. Nye draws upon her own family's roots in a West Bank village near Janna's hometown to offer empathy and insight to the young girl's reporting. Long an advocate for peaceful communication across all boundaries, Nye’s poems in The Tiny Journalist put a human face on war and the violence that divides us from each other.

ISBN-13: 9781942683735

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: BOA Editions - Ltd.

Publication Date: 04-09-2019

Pages: 128

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Series: American Poets Continuum

Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than thirty volumes including four collections of poetry from BOA Editions: Red Suitcase (1994), Fuel (1998), You & Yours (2005), and Transfer (2011). She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Witter Bynner Fellow. Her numerous awards include a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award from BOA, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Patterson Poetry Prize, the Robert Creeley Prize and the Betty Prize from Poets House for her service to poetry. In January 2010, Nye was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. A self-described "wandering poet," she makes her home in San Antonio, Texas.

Read an Excerpt

Morning Song


The tiny journalist


will tell us what she sees.





She wants the world


to be pink.





From her vantage point


everything is huge.





But don’t look down on her.


She’s bigger than you are.





If you stomp on her garden


each leaf curls around its own memory.





Don’t hide what you do.


She sees through.





Her treasures, the shiny buttons


her grandmother loved.





Her cousin, her uncle.


There could have been a shirt…





The tiny journalist notices


each movement on the far away roads.





Little puffs of dust


find her first.





They pretended not to see us.


They came at night with weapons.





She stares through a hole in the fence,


barricade of words and wire.





She feels the rising fire


before anyone strikes a match.





She has a better idea.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Naomi’s incandescent humanity and voice can change the world, or someone’s world, by taking a position not one word less beautiful than an exquisite poem.” —Ibtisam Barakat, nominating judge for the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature




“‘You are living in a poem.’ This is how the poet Naomi Shihab Nye sees the world, and she teaches how this way of being and writing is possible. She has engaged the real-world power of words since her upbringing between her father’s Palestinian homeland and Ferguson, Missouri, near where her American mother grew up. Her father was a refugee journalist, and she carries forward his hopeful passion, his insistence that language must be a way out of cycles of animosity. A poem she wrote, called ‘Kindness,’ is carried around in the pockets and memories of readers around the world.” —Krista Tippett, host of On Being




“Naomi Shihab Nye is an American, an Arab, a Poet, a parent, a woman of Texas, a woman of ideas. Her poems speak of ordinary things—things we take for granted until it's almost too late.” —Bill Moyers




"Nye's writing is mordant, precise, yet like the very best of non-fiction, it makes itself personal in tenor without being explicit in persona. It is not hard to envision the places and problems Nye details as being ones any Muslim-American encounters or that anyone from Middle East may ponder in relating one culture to another." —Coal Hill Review




"Nye is a fluid poet, and her poems are also full of urgency of spoken language. Her direct, unadorned vocabulary serves her well."—Booklist

Table of Contents

I

Morning Song 17

Moon over Gaza 19

Exotic Animals, Book for Children 20

Janna 21

Separation Wall 23

Dareen Said Resist 24

In Northern Ireland They Called It "The Troubles" 25

How Long? 26

For Palestine 27

Small People 29

Women in Black 30

And That Mysterious Word Holy 32

Netanyahu 33

Studying English 34

Losing as Its Own Flower 35

Pink 38

Mothers Waiting for Their Sons 39

"Israelis Let Bulldozers Grind to Halt" 40

Harvest 41

Shadow 42

Dead Sea 43

Tattoo 44

Sometimes There Is a Day 45

Advice 46

America Gives Israel Ten Million Dollars a Day 47

Gratitude List 49

It Was or It Wasn't 50

Gaza Is Not Far Away 51

My Wisdom 53

Each Day We Are Given So Many Gifts 57

Jerusalem 58

Missing It 59

A Person in Northern Ireland 60

38 Billion 61

Better Vision 62

The Space We're In 63

No Explosions 64

II

Facebook Notes 67

Mediterranean Blue 68

To Netanyahu 69

Pharmacy 70

My Father, on Dialysis 71

Blood on All Your Shirts 72

My Immigrant Dad, On Voting 73

You Are Your Own State Department 74

Elementary 76

On the Old Back Canal Road by the International Hotel, Guangzhou 78

Gray Road North from Shenzhen 79

Stun 80

All I Can Do 81

In Some Countries 82

Seeing His Face 83

Wales 84

Peace Talks 85

Freedom of Speech (What the head-of-school told me) 86

Jerusalem's Smile 87

On the Birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King 88

False Alarm Hawai'i 89

A Palestinian Might Say 90

Alien Rescue 91

The Sweeper 93

Arab Festival T-shirt 94

One Small Sack in Syria 95

Positivism 96

Regret 97

Salvation 98

The Old Journalist Talks to Janna 99

Grandfathers Say 100

The Old Journalist Writes... 101

Friend 104

Happy Birthday 105

Stay Afloat 106

To Sam Maloof's Armchair 108

Unforgettable 109

Rumor Mill 110

Patience Conversations 111

Living 113

Tiny Journalist Blues 114

Acknowledgments 116

About the Author 118

Colophon 124