The Naomi Shihab Nye Prize was established in 2024 with the aim of encouraging writers in our Arab community to create book length stories for and about young Arab readers.

The prize is open to Arab American and Arab Canadian writers and recognizes unpublished English-language middle-grade manuscripts intended for readers ages 8–12. Authors are invited to submit their original works, celebrating the richness of Arab storytelling in North America.

The competition awards a $1,000 prize for first place and $500 for second place. Initiated by Barbara Nimri Aziz, this prize is hosted by Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture to honor the legacy of acclaimed author Naomi Shihab Nye, whose contributions to children’s literature continue to inspire new generations of writers.

About Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian-American author, editor, and educator celebrated for her pioneering work in children’s literature. She has been the U.S. Young People’s Poet Laureate, a poetry editor for major publications, and a recipient of multiple Lifetime Achievement Awards. Her books include Habibi, Sitti’s Secrets, 19 Varieties of Gazelle, The Turtle of Oman, and The Turtle of Michigan, among many others. Her work bridges cultures and voices, making her a powerful advocate for the arts and Arab heritage.

Submissions will open March 2025. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive updates. Judges for the 2025 Prize are TBA!

Eligibility

Entrants must be Arab Canadian or Arab American
Manuscripts may be a fictional or semi-fictional work in any genre.
Submissions may be up to 200 pages.
Manuscripts will be accepted online, only in .pdf format

Details from Women against the Night by Helen Zughaib, 20 x 30", gouache on board, 2008

Meet Our 2024 Winners

Alia Yunis, First Place: Making Miracles in Minesota

Alia Yunis loves trees, and she only recently has realized that trees have been foundational to most of her writing and filmmaking. Her documentary, The Golden Harvest, a 6,000-year-old love story between the people of the Mediterranean and their olive trees, including the story of her father. This led to Tree Routed, an interactive film platform globally connecting personal heritage stories about trees, a work in progress. She is now working on Datelines, a film about the odd journey of the date palm from Arabia to the US and back. Her novel, the Night Counter (Random House 2010), which involves a very mobile fig tree, has been critically acclaimed by the Washington Post and several other publications. As a professor, her teaching and research has focused on the intersections of the Arab and Islamic words with heritage, environment and media. In 2010, she co-founded the Sayed University Middle East Film Festival (ZUMEFF), now the longest-running film festival in the Gulf. Alia co-edited Re-Orienting the Middle East: Film and Digital Media Where the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean Meet (Indiana University Press, 2024) and Future Stories in the Global Heritage Industry (Routledge, 2024).

Guidelines

March 2025 (check back for exact dates)—submission period opens
June 10—competition closes
Entry fee—$25 USD upon submission
If names used in your story might reveal your identity, please use pseudonym.
Kindly use 12-font and 1.15 spacing.
Entrant’s name must not appear anywhere on manuscript.
Exclude any footnotes or works cited from your manuscript.
Include page number at top right corner.
Include title page and page count on your submission form.
Our award results will be announced September 2025

Producer

Barbara Nimri Aziz is a NY-based journalist and anthropologist. She is past director of RAWI, former producer/host of “RadioTahrir” on WBAI Radio-NYC. barbaranimri.com

Hosting Institution

Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture is a Philadelphia-based non-profit that offers artistic and educational programming that enriches understanding and celebrates diversity, while supporting the pursuit and affirmation of Arab American cultural identity.

Lisa Volta-Zalloum, Interim Executive Director of Al-Bustan, is a member of our Prize Organizing Committee.

Queries: info@albustanseeds.org

Pauline Kaldas, Second Place: A Place So Far Away

Pauline Kaldas is the author of The Measure of Distance (novel), Looking Both Ways (essays), The Time Between Places (stories), Letters from Cairo (memoir), Egyptian Compass (poetry), and the textbook, Writing the Multicultural Experience. She also co-edited Dinarzad's Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction and Beyond Memory: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Creative Nonfiction. She was awarded a fellowship in fiction from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and has been in residency at MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Writers Colony at Diary Hollow, and Green Olive Arts in Morocco. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Hollins University.