Arab World | Poetry, Culture & Heritage

Selected Biographical Notes

Rajaa Gharbi is an international multi-disciplinary artist, poet and sociolinguist born and raised in Tunisia where she trained and worked for seven years as a multimedia artist with the OTEMA (The National Puppet Theatre) and became Tunisia’s first salaried female puppet theatre artist). Deeply influenced by her mother’s clothes design sense of visual harmony and storytelling from her father- Gharbi’s paternal grand-mother was the storyteller of Tunisia’s last king (Bey), she created and performed tiges marionette characters in Tunisia’s prestigious and neighborhood theatres. She also kept a notebook in her pocket for writing poems and proverbs since elementary school. Living in Washington state since 1982 she established herself and matured in the US as a painter and a poet and became the first North African English language poet in the United States to be published and awarded public funding for poetry work. Both her visual art and poetry have been published, studied and anthologized by art curators and literary scholars in the United States and overseas, with individual and group exhibitions and poetry readings in both the West and East coasts of the US in public and academic settings since 1984.

Gharbi’s translation of her own poetry was nominated in 2018 for Tunisia’s National Book Translation Award; Songs of Bridges, Paintings and Selected Poems (Medali Editions, Tunis, Tunisia 2018). In 2006 H.E. Najib Hachana, Ambassador of Tunisia to the US in Washington DC awarded the Hannibal Arts and Culture Grant for her retrospective art exhibition and poetry book signing in the Cultural Space of the embassy of Tunisia.

She has been a featured artist and poet on Tunisia’s national television, radio stations and newspapers in 1990, 1993, 1994, 2009, 2011, 2012 and 2018). She was nominated in 2007 for the Seattle Mayor’s Art Award and the Horace Mann Achievement Award (1986-2006) which included her artwork and books of poems -2004 From Songs of a Grasshopper, poems and paintings, 1998 Digging for Gems, poems and her book of essays Blue Forces.

Gharbi has undergraduate and graduate degrees in Applied Communication/Fine Art, Creative Writing and Filmmaking. She is a member of Academy of American Poets and PEN US.

https://RajaaGharbi.com