Khaled Mattawa was born in Benghazi, Libya, and immigrated to the U.S. in his teens, where he became an American citizen in 1997. He lived in the deep South for many years, and earned his undergraduate degree in political science and economics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Mattawa received an MA in creative writing from Indiana University. His work has won many prizes, including the Alfred Hodder Fellowship (Princeton University), a Guggenheim fellowship, and an NEA translation grant. He is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor