Ruth Awad
(Columbus)
Ruth Awad’s first book of poetry Set to Music a Wildfire (2017) won Southern Indiana Review Press’ Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry.
The poems in this collection deal with a Lebanese Civil War’s survivor’s emigration to and life in America from his and the perspectives of those around him.
In an interview with Flypaper Lit, Awad said: “I’m just trying to tell a story that has personal meaning and that other people might relate to. The world is chaotic, and confusing, and mean; and I think one of the kind things in the world is art.”
In the poem “Surah al-Qiyamah: My Father Talks to God When Syria Occupies Tripoli, 1976,” amidst the violence of invasion, the speaker admits: “I love this fleeting world even / as I run through the streets, the heat slung on my back, / shots mottling the window where I bought bread.”
If you enjoyed Set to Music a Wildfire, we suggest these Ohio side trips:
- Barbara Fant’s Mouths of Garden
- Mary Biddinger’s O Holy Insurgency
- Virginia Konchan’s The End of Spectacle
- Hannah Stephenson’s In the Kettle, the Shriek