Samiha Khrais Author

Samiha Khrais is a prolific award-winning Jordanian Novelist and Playwright. She has received a number of awards including the Abu al-Qasim al-Shabi Award from Tunis in 2004, the Arab Thought Foundation's Literary Creativity Award in 2008, Jordan's Recognition Award in 2014, and the King Hussein Medal of Excellence in 2015. A number of her works have been translated to German, and many were adapted for Jordanian radio and television.

Nesreen Akhtarkhavari is Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Culture and the director of Arabic Studies at DePaul University, where she teaches Arabic literature, film, culture, media, and translation. She cotranslated Desert Sorrows, recognized by World Literature Today as one of the seventy-five top translations for 2015, and the first-ever English translation of Rumi's Arabic poems, Love Is My Savior: The Arabic Poems of Rumi.