Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine

Jane Hirshfield is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Beauty; Come, Thief; After; and Given Sugar, Given Salt. She has edited and co-translated four books presenting the work of poets from the past and she’s the author of the essay collection, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. Her books have been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize; they have been named best books of the year by the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon, and Financial Times; and they have won the California Book Award, the Poetry Center Book Award, and the Donald Hall–Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf) is her new   collection of essays on how the best poems work. Her latest poetry collection, The Beauty: Poems (Knopf), uses materials sometimes familiar, sometimes unexpected, to explore the magnitude, singularity, and permeability of our shared existence. Hirshfield is also a contributor to the new anthology Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine (OR Books). NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2015

Reginald Dwayne Betts’s first collection of poems, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, won the Beatrice Hawley Award. His memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, received the 2010 NAACP Image Award for non-fiction. Betts’ work has led to a Soros Justice Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes. Currently a Yale Law student, Betts was appointed by President Obama to the Coordinating Council of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in 2012.

Ru Freeman's creative and political writing has appeared internationally. She is the author of the novels A Disobedient Girl and On Sal Mal Lane, a New York Times Notable, and Editor's Choice Book. Both novels have been translated into several languages including Italian, French, Hebrew, and Chinese. She is Editor of the ground-breaking anthology, Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine. She blogs for the Huffington Post on literature and politics, is a contributing editorial board member of the Asian American Literary Review, and has been a fellow of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. ​She is the 2014 winner of the Sister Mariella Gable Award for Fiction, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman. Freeman is also a contributor to Me, My Hair, and I: Twenty-seven Women Untangle an Obsession (Algonquin), an anthology that proves what every woman knows—many things in life matter more than hair, but few bring as much pleasure as a really great hairdo.

Tom Sleigh’s books of poetry include Army Cats, winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Updike Award, and Space Walk, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award. He is also the author of Interview with a Ghost. He teaches at Hunter College in New York. Station Zed: Poems (Graywolf Press) is the terminal outpost beyond which is the unknown. It is also the poet Tom Sleigh’s finest work. In this latest collection, Sleigh brings to these poems his experiences as a journalist on tours of Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, and Libya. But these are also dispatches from places of grief, history, and poetic traditions as varied as Scottish ballads and the journeys of Bashō. Sleigh is a contributor to the new anthology Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine (OR Books). David Mura writes of this collection, “In Extraordinary Rendition, an eclectic range of American writers break through the stereotypes and distortions of our media and provide a far more nuanced, penetrating and three-dimensional portrait of Palestinians, their history and the political realities they face daily. The range of genres and approaches make this a necessary and timely anthology, and it should be read by as large and wide-ranging an audience as possible.”