Fady Joudah’s Earth in the Attic is winner of the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and judge Louise Glück’s fifth selection for the series.

Judge Glück describes the poet in her Foreword as “that strange animal, the lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession. . . have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas.” She finds in his poetry an incantatory quality and concludes, “These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of conception is inescapable. The Earth in the Attic is varied, coherent, fierce, tender; impossible to put down, impossible to forget.”

Read an excerpt, or listen to Joudah read “In the Calm” from his poem, “Pulse.”

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American medical doctor and a field member of Doctors Without Borders since 2001. He is also the translator of Mahmoud Darwish’s recent poetry The Butterfly’s Burden. He lives in Houston, TX.

The Yale Series of Younger Poets champions the most promising new American poets. Awarded since 1919, the Yale Younger Poets prize is the oldest annual literary award in the United States. Past winners include Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, William Meredith, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, John Hollander, James Tate, and Carolyn Forché.