Hayan Charara, Ph.D.
Hayan Charara, Ph.D., is a poet, novelist, children’s book author, essayist, editor, and Associate Professor, The Honors College. His poetry books are “The Alchemist’s Diary” (2001), “The Sadness of Others” (2006), “Something Sinister” (2016), and “These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit” (2022). He is also the author of the novel, “Hush, Little Children (2025), and his children’s book, “The Three Lucys” (2016), received the New Voices Award Honor, and he edited “Inclined to Speak” (2008), an anthology of contemporary Arab American poetry. With Fady Joudah, he is also a series editor of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, which publishes first and second poetry books by poets of Arab heritage.
His honors include a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lucille Joy Prize in Poetry from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, the John Clare Prize, and the Arab American Book Award.
Born in Detroit in 1972 to Arab immigrants (both parents came to the United States from Lebanon, in the 1960s), he studied biology and chemistry at Wayne State University before turning to poetry. He spent a decade in New York City, where he earned a master’s degree from New York University’s Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program. In 2004, he moved to Texas, where he eventually earned his Ph.D. in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston. He is a past president of RAWI, the Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc., a national literary arts organization that provides mentoring, community, and support for Arab American writers and those with roots in the Arabic speaking world and the diaspora.
He has taught at a number of colleges and universities, including Queens College, the City University of New York-La Guardia, the University of Texas at Austin, Trinity University, and Our Lady of the Lake University. He currently teaches in the Honors College and for the English Department and Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.