Hala Alyan is an award-winning Palestinian American poet, novelist and clinical psychologist whose work has appeared in numerous journals including The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner and Colorado Review. As a visiting fellow, she will be working on her novel in progress, The Arsonists’ City, about a family that unravels as its members come together to sell their ancestral home in Beirut.
Hala was the 2018 recipient of The Dayton Literary Peace Prize in fiction. Inspired by the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that ended the war in Bosnia, The Dayton Literary Peace Prize is the only international literary peace prize awarded in the United States. The Prize celebrates the power of literature to promote peace, social justice, and global understanding.