D H Melhem

Bio

Author of five books of poetry, two critical works, one novel, a musical drama, a creative writing workbook, over 50 published essays, and editor of three anthologies, D. H. Melhem was born in Brooklyn, New York, and died in Long Beach, California. Her Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice (1987) was the first comprehensive study of the poet. Melhem received her Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center and was nominated for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in Women’s Studies. Her Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Introductions and Interviews (1990) was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship Study and won a 1991 American Book Award. Winner of numerous awards for her poetry, she has received wide acclaim for the elegy Rest in Love (reissued 1995) and Country: An Organic Poem (1998). Of her novel, Blight (1995), Cynthia Ozick wrote: An amazing and original parable . . . an indelible exemplum that will endure. Vice-president of the International Women’s Writing Guild, she was a former board member of Pen & Brush and of RAWI (Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc.). She co-edited (with Leila Diab) A Different Path, the first RAWI anthology (2000); also in 2000, a chapbook, Poems for You.