Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Her latest novel, The Arsonists’ City, was published in March 2021 and was a finalist for the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year.  Her work has been published by the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, LitHub, the New York Times Book Review, and  Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter, where she works as a clinical psychologist.