Two New Chancellors: Khaled Mattawa and Alberto Rios

New Chancellors Join the Academy

Poets Khaled Mattawa and Alberto Ríos have been elected Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, an honorary position that has been held by some of the most distinguished poets in the United States. Mattawa and Ríos will each serve for a period of six years.

Alberto Ríos is the author of several poetry collections, including his most recently published, The Dangerous Shirt (Copper Canyon Press, 2009). He is also the inaugural state poet of Arizona.

"For decades, Alberto Ríos has graciously, wittily, and lovingly created a rich body of poems and prose evoking the culture of Mexican American family and community life along the borderlands and in the vast deserts and mountainscapes of Arizona and the American West," said Chancellor Naomi Shihab Nye. "His dazzling voice weaves the disappearing magic of ancestral memory into the mysteries of changing time--always a glowing champion for the power of the particular and the undersung."

Read More About Ríos >

Poems by Ríos:

"Day of the Refugios"

"Teodoro Luna's Two Kisses"

"The Cities Inside Us"

Photo credit: Tom Story/Arizona State University

Born in Benghazi, Libya, in 1964, Khaled Mattawa immigrated to the United States in his teens. He is the author of several poetry collections, including his most recently published, Tocqueville (New Issues, 2010).

Khaled Mattawa "is one of the best, most inventive, lyrical, and intellectually challenging American poets of his generation," said Chancellor Marilyn Hacker. "His work is as daring in its amalgam of poetic techniques as it is dazzling in the breadth of its subject matter."