Ayat Abou Shmeiss

Ayat Abou Shmeiss (; born 1984) is an Arab-Israeli poet from Jaffa.

Biography Abou Shmeiss was born in Jaffa. Her mother, who was illiterate and insisted she get the best and broadest education possible. As a result, she completed her schooling at the French Jaffa school College de Ferrer, and speaks five languages: Arabic, Hebrew, French, English and Spanish. She is the second of four children.

Her first book of poetry, A Basket Full of Silent Languages (סל מלא שפות שותקות) came out in 2013, in both Arabic and Hebrew. Her second, I Am Two (אני זה שניים), also a bilingual volume, was published in 2018.

Abou Shmeiss, who writes in Hebrew, won the Emerging Poets Award from the Israel Ministry of Culture in 2015. but that it came naturally for her to write in Hebrew – to her Arabic is a holy language, the language of the Quran, and she would be diminishing it by writing her everyday thoughts and feeling. Her second collection, I Am Two, expresses this duality. She says that to Israelis, if she writes about her Palestinian identity, they view her as a traitor, and Palestinians view her that way because she writes in the language of their oppressor. She says, however, "I have learned to live in halves". Some of her poems have been translated and published in English.

Abou Shmeiss is married to Ahmed, and has one son, Mahmoud. Iaat and Ahmed became engaged when she was 15 and he 17, and were married when she was 18. Sami Michael Award for Social Justice, 2020