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Laureate of the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature in 2013, Palestinian American writer, editor, and educator Naomi Shihab Nye grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she continues to live. She has been Young People’s Poet Laureate for the US, poetry editor for the New York Times Magazine and Texas Observer, and a visiting writer in hundreds of schools and communities all over the world. Her volume 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East was a finalist for the National Book Award. She received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Texas Institute of Letters and the National Book Critics Circle.