Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet and songwriter born in 1952 to a Palestinian father, who worked as a journalist, editor and writer, and American mother, who worked as a Montessori School teacher. Her father grew up in Palestine. He and his family became refugees in 1948, when the state of Israel was created. She has said her father “seemed a little shell-shocked when I was a child.” She grew up initially in Ferguson, St. Louis County, Missouri. In 1966, when Nye was 14, the family moved to the West Bank, Palestine when her father’s mother was sick. After less that a year, before the 1967 Six-Day War occurred, they moved to San Antonio, Texas.

Nye graduated from Robert E. Lee High School, where she was editor of the literary magazine. She earned a BA in English and world religions from Trinity University in 1974 and has lived in San Antonio ever since.

Shihab Nye lives in San Antonio, Texas with her family. In 1978 she married Michael Nye, who worked initially as an attorney and latterly on photography and on writing on topics including hunger, teenage pregnancy and mental illness. They have one son.

Nye has won many awards and fellowships, among them four Pushcart Prizes, the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and many notable book and best book citations from the American Library Association, and a 2,000 Witter Bynner Fellowship. In 1997, Trinity University, her alma mater, honored her with the Distinguished Alumna Award.

In June 2009, Nye was named as one of PeaceByPeace.com’s first peace heroes. In 2013, Nye won the Robert Creeley Award.

In October 2012, she was named laureate of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature. The NSK Prize is a juried award sponsored by the University of Oklahoma and World Literature Today magazine. In her nominating statement, Ibtisam Barakat, the juror who championed Nye for the award wrote, “Naomi’s incandescent humanity and voice can change the world, or someone’s world, by taking a position not one word less beautiful than an exquisite poem.” Barakat commended her work by saying, “Naomi’s poetry masterfully blends music, images, colors, languages, and insights into poems that ache like a shore pacing in ebb and flow, expecting the arrival of meaning.”

In 2019, the Poetry Foundation designated Nye their Young People’s Poet Laureate for the 2019–21 term. The Foundation’s announcement characterized Nye’s writing style as one that “moves seamlessly between ages in a way that is accessible, warm, and sophisticated even for the youngest of readers.”