Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha (born 1975) is a Palestinian American poet, essayist, and translator. She is the author of three poetry collections and two chapbooks, including Something About Living, which won the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry.

Her first collection, Water & Salt, won the 2018 Washington State Book Award for Poetry. Something About Living won the same award in 2025, as well as the 2025 George Ellenbogen Poetry Award.

Early life and education Tuffaha was born in Seattle in 1975.

She earned a BA in comparative literature from the University of Washington and an MFA in poetry from Pacific Lutheran University's Rainier Writing Workshop. In 2005, she co-founded the Institute for Middle East Understanding. Her debut full-length collection, Water & Salt, was published by Red Hen Press in 2017 and won the 2018 Washington State Book Award for Poetry. She received a 2019 Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship.

Her second full-length collection, Kaan and Her Sisters, was published by Trio House Press in 2023. It was a finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award in poetry.

Tuffaha's third full-length collection, Something About Living, was published by the University of Akron Press in 2024. It won the 2022 Akron Poetry Prize and the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry. In 2025, it won the Washington State Book Award for Poetry and the George Ellenbogen Poetry Award at the Arab American Book Awards. As a translator and editor, she was the translator and curator of the 2022 series Poems from Palestine at The Baffler and later curated the Words Without Borders series Against Silence: Palestinian Writing in English.

Publishers Weekly called Kaan and Her Sisters an "imaginative and searching collection" and wrote that it uses intergenerational memory to examine survival, violence, family, and displacement. Reviewing Something About Living, the same magazine described Tuffaha's collection as a "superb volume" about homeland, heritage, and a "fairer future". In Poetry Northwest, Robin Myers wrote that there is "no consolation" in Something About Living and analyzed the book's repetition and documentary modes in relation to Palestinian dispossession.

Works Poetry collections Arab in Newsland. Two Sylvias Press. 2017. . Water & Salt. Red Hen Press. 2017. . Letters from the Interior. Diode Editions. 2019. . Kaan and Her Sisters. Trio House Press. 2023. . Something About Living. University of Akron Press. 2024. .