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Naomi Shihab Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, where she still lives. Winner of the 2024 Wallace Stevens Award for Lifetime Achievement, she is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Different Ways to Pray, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, and The Tiny Journalist. In addition, she has published novels, picture books, and young adult fiction, including The Turtle of Michigan (Greenwillow, 2022). Designated the 2019–2021 Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation, Nye is on faculty at Texas State University.

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Mothers
Growing Old
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My Mom Serves Tea to Her Robbers

by Naomi Shihab Nye
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Later she will say, they wore white shirts,
their faces were kind. One took milk with his sugar.

They had an interest in how she’d been living alone,
in that long brick house, since my father died.
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