Kareem James Abu-Zeid


Kareem James Abu-Zeid is an Egyptian-American translator, editor, and writer. He was born in Kuwait and grew up in the Middle East. He studied French and German language and literature at Princeton University, taking translation workshops under poets CK Williams and Paul Muldoon, and graduating summa cum laude in 2003.
He lived an itinerant life around Europe and the Middle East for several years, before moving to California for graduate studies. He obtained a master's degree and a PhD in comparative literature from UC Berkeley, with a dissertation focusing on modern poetry as spiritual practice. Following his PhD, he resumed a nomadic lifestyle for several more years, spending significant periods of time in southern India, before finally settling in New Mexico.
He has taught university courses in writing, language, literature, and philosophy in four different languages at Berkeley, Mannheim and Heidelberg, and currently works as a freelance translator from Arabic, French, and German into English, as well as a freelance editor of English-language texts. He also does a significant amount of work editing the translations of other translators, and currently serves as a mentor for emerging translators with the American Literary Translators Association. Abu-Zeid has the following books to his name:
He contributes regularly to literary journals and websites such as Words Without Borders, Guernica, and Three Percent. He was the winner of PEN Center USA's 2017 Translation Prize. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts translation grant, literary residencies from the Lannan Foundation and the Banff Centre for the Arts, as well as Poetry magazine's 2014 translation prize, a Fulbright Fellowship and Fulbright Enterprise Scholarship in 2003/04 in Germany, and a CASA Fellowship at the American University in Cairo.