In 2026, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Hala Alyan discusses her curatorial approach and her own creative work.

Poets.org: Welcome to the Guest Editor Q&A, hosted by the Academy of American Poets. I’m Mary Sutton, editorial director at the Academy, and I’m here today with the Guest Editor for May, Hala Alyan. Hala is the author of The Moon that Turns You Back. Hala, welcome and thank you.

Hala Alyan: Hello. Thank you for having me. Thank you.

Poets.org: Thank you for joining me. This is fantastic. Let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day for May?

Alyan: Thank you so much. Yeah, I mean, first of all, as someone that’s been an avid reader of Poem-a-Day for many years, it was really exciting to be tapped in for this. And I think I took a little bit of time to think about whether I wanted it to be, you know, approaching this from a place of having there be a themed collection or a collection of poetry that I would put forward, whether I wanted to go after poets who were really widely varying in their approach to poetry. Did I want there to be a bunch of different structures and forms?

I think the biggest issue that I had was really trying to figure out and puzzle through whether it was important for me for there to be connective tissue in the poems that I chose. And then what I ultimately landed on was, well, the connective tissue would be that I chose the poems. And so I sort of relaxed my approach a little bit and just made a list of poets that I have been … really, where the criteria was just that I’ve been moved by their work in some sort of way in recent years. And obviously that was a very long list. And some of the calling came from, well, some of them had been pretty well represented by Poem of Day [sic]. Some of them were disqualified because they had been recently published.

But I did try to have some intentionality in having a combo of established folks and also newer poets. I think it was really important for me to use this platform and this opportunity to spotlight some amazing new talents that I think are still quite emerging. And in terms of the content, in terms of the actual pieces that I picked from the poets that I reached out to, I think I didn’t overthink it too much. I went more instinct and more gut-based than I would have thought I would with something with such a big task. I really chose what incited and evoked some sort of curiosity in me, what made me pause. I read each submission and then just took a few hours to go about my day doing the dishes, hanging out with my kid, et cetera, and then just came back and saw what lingered the most for me, whether that was imagery or the different forms or whatever. And so I think it ended up, despite having sort of really worried about how I was going to approach it, in the end, it ended up just being pretty intuitive.

Poets.org: Now, if you could direct our readers and listeners to one poem or more than one poem at Poets.org that you haven’t curated, what would it be and why?

Alyan: So I love the poem “Kaōnōn” by Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner. There’s a line in particular: “It’s a kind of / love, isn’t it? / To commit to enduring. / Despite, despite.” And when I first read this poem, I immediately whipped out my notebook, and it was actually the very first page of a new journal. And for anyone that is a writer, knows [sic] how special that first page is. And then it just kind of framed that journal for the ensuing year that I would write down notes in it or have entries in it or whatever. It’s a beautiful piece. It really touches upon so many different things. It does that thing of being incredibly specific, and in that specificity is really quite ... portals in quite a bit of universality and access points as the reader. And it’s just, like, the language is stunning.

Poets.org: Jetñil-Kijiner, who’s also a climate activist and does a lot of significant work in that field was part of No‘u Revilla’s May 2024 curation of Poem-a-Day, which was a very interesting and controversial curation, but I think a very necessary and timely curation too, I would say.

Alyan: Yeah. And I think it’s worth noting, I mean, I guess this is likely clear, but just in case people thought I found this by just going on the website, I came across this poem because it landed in my inbox during the Poem-a-Day. And so I think it really was, I remember this was a few months after my separation had started from my marriage, and those lines and so much of what the poem was talking about was, like, it really landed in this very unexpected and very lingering way, so much so that two years later when I was thinking about this question, it was the first poem that came up for me.

Poets.org: And what are you reading now?

Alyan: So I mean, I’m always reading multiple genres at once. So I had just finished Leïla Slimani’s new novel, I’ll Take the Fire. Very excited about it. I am rereading, I had just read it for blurbing purposes a few weeks ago and was kind of revisiting it, Fatimah Asghar’s new poetry collection. And have also been kind of doing some visitation on Scorched Earth by Tiana Clark.

Poets.org: And Tiana just contributed a poem for Poem-a-Day.

Alyan: I know!

Poets.org: We love her [laughs].

Alyan: Well, Tiana was one of my asks. [She said,] “I’m so sorry, I’m spoken for.” [laughs]

Poets.org: By Danusha [Laméris], yes. [laughs] What are you working on now in your writing, teaching, and publishing life?

Alyan: So in my teaching, I’m kind of continuing on ... In some ways, teaching is the most ... It’s sort of the guidepost of my life. And then the other activities sort of are determined by what time and energy is left over from teaching. So I teach at NYU in the graduate psych and the MFA program. So I’m teaching poetry craft. I’m teaching a few classes in the graduate psych counseling program. I’ve been running some narrative therapy groups, so I’m kind of trying to get more into that, sort of ways to combine these two loves of my life as it were.

And then, in terms of writing, I’m working on poetry that examines surrogacy across different thematic lines, so psychological lines, sociopolitical lines, medical, literal, et cetera, as well as some poems that are almost sort of a combo of confessional/legal briefs/prose poems/I’m not sure what they are about my marriage ending. And then, fiction-wise, I’m working on a novel that I’ve been writing for a few months about a woman searching for her missing sister in the desert.

Poets.org: Now, many members of our audience may not have known that you have two different careers as a writer and as a psychologist. You’re not the only one to have careers that are not ostensibly related, right? Fady Joudah is both a medical doctor and a poet. Rafael Campo is also a medical doctor and a poet. But I’m very curious about.... Because there is an element of psychology that is redolent in literature. So I’m very curious about how your work as a psychologist informs and nourishes your work as a poet and vice versa.

Alyan: I think that I feel very fortunate that I chose this field in some ways impulsively as a twenty-two-year-old. I had been majoring in political science. I didn’t want to do that. I thought I wanted international law. I didn’t. And I kind of just did what a few friends of mine that were a little bit older had done. And I came to the States for a grad program in psych because there was something ... again, kind of intuitive. There was something to me that felt charming about listening to people tell me things that they hadn’t told other people. And so kind of the eternal eavesdropper in me was like, “Well, this feels cool.”

So I feel very fortunate that I stumbled into a field that I think actually is really, really complementary to my writing life in that it is ... both my training and the philosophies and theories and discourse that I’ve been exposed to through that education and through continuing education in it, and through teaching, and then learning through my students and learning through my clients has really expanded my understanding of just what motivates us as people, how we connect, how we disconnect, what do we mean by our desires, why do we so often as humans do things that are not in our interest, really asking questions about motivation and intention.

And I have an appetite for interiority that I think that has really been addressed in both careers, both as a writer and as a psychologist and one of them a little bit more outward facing because I think I’m not somebody who lusts after a writing life, full stop. I’m not somebody that would like to just be a ... And by that, I don’t mean just as in only. I mean that would like to spend my time and my hours writing because I know how my brain works and how I’m programmed, and I would not be able to do that. I don’t have, in many ways, the attention span for that. I’m somebody that sort of excels at writing in spurts, kind of really explosively and then needing to do something else that pulls focus, and kind of longing and lusting for the writing, and then getting to come back to it for a little bit and going back to another thing. And so I find that engaging in the classroom, engaging in the clinical space kind of just keeps me asking questions and being interested and being curious in ways that really … it feeds my growth as a writer.

Poets.org: I love that phrase you used, “an appetite for interiority.” My idea of being a successful person is having a rich inner life.

Alyan: Yes, yes.

Poets.org: And I think both poets and psychologists or psychiatrists lead us to that goal.

Alyan: And I think there’s something on the other end of the clinical room or the clinical space of being a psychologist. And I think there’s something about witnessing other people’s rich interior life that also has been really beautiful for me and has helped expand my own interiority, you know. So there’s something about also getting to peek behind the curtain at how other people orient and change their minds and do things that again seem like, “Why are you doing that?” And then it all starts making sense. And I think there’s just something about access to interiority in general, whether it’s my own or it’s someone else’s and the privilege of getting to witness somebody else’s, I think that has just ... yeah, it’s been really delightful.

Poets.org: Well, thank you for this talk, which has also been delightful.

Alyan: I agree. Thank you for having me.