"Lady Liberty" by Columbia professor Nathalie Handal is currently being featured in Poetry in Motion® in New York City. Poetry in Motion is a joint project of the MTA Arts for Transit and Urban Design and the Poetry Society of America. Under this program, New York City Transit posts poems as posters in New York City subways, buses, taxis, and on MetroCards. And the Transit Museum uses the Poetry in Motion poster on products ranging from coffee mugs, journal books, magnets, postcards, and tees. Revenue from sales go to support their educational and exhibition programs. Poems featured are read by more than 7 million commuters daily.
Nathalie Handal's recent collections include The Republics, lauded as "one of the most inventive books by one of today's most diverse writers"; the bestselling The Invisible Star; the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucia; and Love and Strange Horses, which The New York Times says "trembles with belonging (and longing)." Handal is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award, the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature, the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing,and an Honored Finalist for the Gift of Freedom Award, among other honors. She is a professor at Columbia University and writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words without Borders.
From Nathalie Handal:
I started writing "Lady Liberty" while riding the 1 train from Columbia University, where I teach, to Times Square. It was shortly after my brother's son was born here and I wanted him to see New York through the eye's of our family - his fathers old-school version and my sister's funky version, mixed with how I see the Big Apple, a place that somehow keeps you grounded while constantly introducing you to new magic. I travel a lot and each time I return from a different country, I find a slice of that place in NYC. The world lives together here, and creates a divine song. All its versions electrify me. The Statue of Liberty, a French American symbol of freedom, beauty and unity has always been particularly special to me, a New Yorker and a Parisian.
“The world lives together here, and creates a divine song.”
