Laila Halaby

Laila Halaby is the author of two (Beacon Press) novels, Once in a Promised Land (voted one of the top 100 works of fiction in 2007 by the Washington Post, also a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection) and West of the Jordan (winner of a PEN Beyond Margins award), a memoir, The Weight of Ghosts (Red Hen Press), and two collections of poetry, why an author writes to a guy holding a fish (2leaf Press) and my name on his tongue (Syracuse University Press).  Laila was the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship and holds two master’s degrees, in Near Eastern Languages and Culture from UCLA and in Counseling from Loyola Marymount University.  She works as a counselor in psychosocial oncology at the University of Arizona and also collaborates with communities and organizations to implement creative writing classes and other programming.