Mohamed Metwalli won the Yussef El-Khal Prize by Riyad El-Rayes Publishers in Lebanon for his poetry collection Once upon a Time in 1992. He was poet-in-residence at the University of Chicago in 1998. Other collections include The Story the People Tell in the Harbour (1998), The Lost Promenades (2010), and A Song by the Aegean Sea (2015). He compiled and co-edited an anthology of offbeat Egyptian poetry, Angry Voices, published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2002.