Yahya Frederickson, English, keynote speaker at this year’s Student Academic Conference
Yahya Frederickson will be the keynote speaker at this year’s Student Academic Conference on Tuesday, April 14, 2015. To view the full schedule and list of presentation abstracts for this year’s Student Academic Conference, visit www.mnstate.edu/sac.
Biography
Yahya Frederickson teaches writing and literature at Minnesota State University Moorhead. He holds a B.A. in The Individual and Society, an individualized major, from MSUM, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Montana, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Dakota. Between graduate degrees he taught for six years in Yemen, initially as a Peace Corps Volunteer. He served as a Fulbright Scholar in Syria in 2005 and in Saudi Arabia in 2011.
He is the author of The Gold Shop of Ba-‘Ali, which won Lost Horse Press’s 2013 Idaho Prize. He’s also the author of 3⅓ chapbooks. The latest chapbook, The Birds of Al-Merjeh Square: Poems from Syria, won the 2013 Open Chapbook Competition at Finishing Line Press. His other chapbooks are Month of Honey, Month of Missiles (Tigertail, 2009), Returning to Water (Dacotah Territory, 2006) and Trilogy (Dacotah Territory, 1985, with Julie Taylor and Richard Schetnan).
Nominated five times for Pushcart Prizes, Yahya has been the recipient of two Academy of American Poets Thomas McGrath Memorial Awards, a Lake Region Arts Council/McKnight Foundation Fellowship grant, and a residency at The Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies.
His poems have appeared literary journals such as Arts & Letters, Black Warrior Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Cream City Review, CutBank, Cutthroat, Flyway, Great River Review, Green Mountains Review, Hanging Loose, The Laurel Review, Luna, Al-Masar, Midwestern Gothic, Mizna, Ninth Letter, Pilgrimage, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, Quarter After Eight, Quarterly West, The Southern Review, WLA (War, Literature, & the Arts), Water~Stone Review, Witness, and others.
His translations (with Muhammed Shoukany) of contemporary Saudi Arabian poets appeared in New Voices of Arabia: The Poetry: An Anthology from Saudi Arabia (I.B. Tauris, 2012).