19 pages • 38 minutes read
Naomi Shihab NyeDifferent Ways to Pray
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1980A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“The Words Under the Words” by Naomi Shihab Nye (1995)
Printed in her 2005 collection Words Under the Words: Selected Poems and originally published in 1995, this poem has many similarities to “Different Ways to Pray,” including content and form. The poem takes place in Jerusalem and notes many aspects of the Middle East where the speaker’s grandmother lives. Like “Different Ways to Pray,” “The Words Under the Words” is divided into several stanzas, each of which describes another aspect of the speaker’s grandmother’s life.
“A Palestinian Might Say” by Naomi Shihab Nye (2019)
Published in Nye’s recent collection The Tiny Journalist (2019), “A Palestinian Might Say” explores what it is to feel like an outsider in one’s country solely because of one’s ethnicity or race. Nye, who is half Palestinian and identifies as an Arab American, understands how difficult it is to live in a place that once felt like home and to experience that feeling of “home” taken away.
“There Are Birds Here” by Jamaal May (2016)
Written for the city of Detroit, an area that has seen poverty and destruction over the 20th and 21st century, May’s poem “There Are Birds Here” was published in his collection The Big Book of Exit Strategies (2016). Like Nye’s poetry, which tends to consider what’s been lost while also celebrating the hope, love, and peace that remain, May’s poem also celebrates the hope of life, love, and the future through the metaphor of birds.
Further Literary Resources
“Naomi Shihab Nye on Poetry, Humanity, and WiFi” by Barbara Purcell (2020)
This lengthy article on Nye published in Sight Lines Magazine shares background information on Nye’s years following graduation from college, how she worked as a creative writing teacher in the local school system and learned how important poetry is—especially to young children and adolescents. This piece sheds light on why Nye was the perfect candidate for The Poetry Foundation's Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2019-21.
“Darling: A poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, published in The Atlantic in 1995” by Naomi Shihab Nye (2020)
This short piece in The Atlantic, which shares a bit about Nye as a Palestinian American, reprints a poem of Nye’s, “Darling,” which was originally published in the publication in 1995. Reading this poem and the short biography on Nye place the poem into perspective and offer even more insight into how Nye grappled with living a divided life between two cultures, nations, languages, and identities.
“Naomi Shihab Nye: 2015 National Book Festival” Library of Congress (2015)
In this nearly 30-minute-long video of Nye reading at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., she discusses The Turtle of Oman, one of her novels which follows Aref Al-Amri, who must say goodbye to his life in Oman and move to Ann Arbor, Michigan. The book was awarded a Middle East Book Award in 2015 and offers another perspective on Nye’s writing and skill as a creative.
Related Titles
By Naomi Shihab Nye
