Yahia Lababidi

Yahia Lababidi is an acclaimed Arab-American writer of Palestinian heritage, author of more than a dozen books of aphorisms, poetry, and essays. His work weaves together Eastern mysticism, Western philosophy, and his Arab roots to explore life’s enduring questions: love, spirituality, suffering, and self-discovery.

Latest Books

On the Contrary (Fomite Press, 2025) is a lyrical meditation on the aesthetics and ethics of Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde, two contrarians who turned life into art and thought into moral adventure.

What Remains to Be Said (Wild Goose Publications, 2025) gathers three decades of aphorisms: concise, poetic illuminations that offer clarity and calm in a noisy age. In a time of conflict and distraction, these reflections invite contemplation and renewal.

Recent Work

Palestine Wail (Daraja Press, 2024), a love letter to Gaza written amid ongoing catastrophe, has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and translated into seven languages. Beloved poet Naomi Shihab Nye writes:

“So many of us are wailing with Yahia Lababidi, who is not afraid to call out truth in the midst of catastrophe... to grieve for the children who didn’t deserve any of this nightmare, and to offer revelations.”

These poems have been read at international festivals and public gatherings, shared in classrooms, and featured among Democracy in Exile’s Top 10 Articles of 2024.

Quarantine Notes (Fomite Press, 2023) collects brief meditations written during the global pandemic. Thomas Merton scholar Robert Inchausti calls it “sincerity and truth beyond measure... words that heal.”

Desert Songs (Rowayat, 2022) is a hymn to Egypt’s deserts, with Arabic translations by Syrian poet Osama Esber and photography by Zakaria Wakrim.

Learning to Pray: A Book of Longing (Kelsay Books, 2021) invites a spiritual yet undogmatic journey. Abdal Hakim Murad, Dean of Cambridge Muslim College, praises it as “a summons to a spiritual but entirely undogmatic journey.” Former Newsweek correspondent Carla Power describes it as “lean, luminescent verse... guiding us to be our best selves.”

Earlier Works

Revolutions of the Heart (Wipf & Stock, 2020) gathers essays and dialogues at the crossroads of literature, activism, and mysticism.

His aphorism collections, Signposts to Elsewhere (2019) and Where Epics Fail (2018), were praised by President Barack Obama’s inaugural poet Richard Blanco: “Aphorisms are an ancient form, but its current-day master is Yahia Lababidi.” Signposts was chosen as a Book of the Year by The Independent (UK) and published by Hay House.

Balancing Acts: New & Selected Poems (1993 to 2015) (Press 53) celebrates over twenty years of poetry. Vermont Poet Laureate Chard deNiord writes that it “resonates in plainspoken yet dazzling poetry—sometimes epigrammatic, sometimes expansive—that reveals influences from Rumi to Kierkegaard, Dickinson to Kafka.”

Other titles include Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Belly Dancing, Fever Dreams, Barely There, and The Artist as Mystic (with Alex Stein).

Recognition & Media

Lababidi’s writing has been featured on PBS NewsHour, NPR, ABC Radio, On Being with Krista Tippett, Best American Poetry, World Literature Today, The Guardian, and Al Jazeera. He has spoken at Oxford University and participated in international poetry festivals across the United States, Europe, and the Middle East.

A five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he has served as a juror for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and as a judge for the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. His work has been translated into Arabic, Hebrew, Slovak, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Dutch, and Swedish.

He is the only contemporary Arab writer included in Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists and the youngest poet featured in the college anthology Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing (10th ed.). His writing appears in notable anthologies such as Short Flights (Schaffner Press), Small Blows Against Encroaching Totalitarianism (McSweeney’s), and Masks: Bowie & Artists of Artifice (Intellect Books), alongside Slavoj Žižek and Gary Valentine of Blondie.