High Desert

Andre Naffis-Sahely is a poet, editor and translator whose many publications include two collections, The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin Books, 2017) and High Desert (Bloodaxe Books, 2022), and a pamphlet, The Other Side of Nowhere (Rough Trade Books, 2019). He edited The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (2020) and is editor of Poetry London. He has translated over twenty titles of fiction, poetry and nonfiction, including works by Honore de Balzac, Emile Zola, Alessandro Spina, Abdellatif Laabi, Franketienne, Ribka Sibhatu and Tahar Ben Jelloun. Several of these titles were selected as 'books of the year' by NPR, The Guardian and Financial Times. He grew up in Abu Dhabi, but was born in Venice to an Iranian father and an Italian mother. He has taught at Whittier College, Occidental College, and University of California, Los Angeles, where he was the Author in Residence. He is a Visiting Teaching Fellow at the Manchester Writing School in the UK, and a Lecturer at University of California, Davis in the US.