Yahia Lababidi

Yahia Lababidi (@YahiaLababidi), Egyptian American, is the author of seven books of poetry and prose. His latest book, Where Epics Fail: Aphorisms on Art, Morality and Life of the Spirit, was featured on the PBS NewsHour and generously endorsed by Richard Blanco, Barack Obama’s inaugural poet. Balancing Acts: New & Selected Poems (1993–2015) debuted at #1 on Amazon’s Hot New Releases in 2016.

Where Epics Fail: Meditations to Live By by Yahia Lababidi

Spring 2019
Yahia Lababidi

London. Unbound. 2018. 256 pages. Yahia Lababidi has done something at once anachronistic and deeply contemporary with Where Epics Fail, his wide-ranging collection of aphorisms. The book is...
Rimbaud’s Spiritual Battle

January 10, 2019 | Yahia Lababidi

Enrapture Captivating Media / Unsplash What becomes a legend most? Great talent, suffering, and mystery . . . three ingredients that French poet Arthur Rimbaud possessed in spades. General rea...
Radical Love: Bliss, Beauty, and Islam’s Mystical Tradition

May 16, 2018 | Yahia Lababidi

Photo: Zakaria Wakram Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language. – Meister Eckhart We live in unexemplary times, maddened by fear, murde...
Seeking the Light through Literature

November 2017
Yahia Lababidi

Agostino Arrivabene (b. 1967, Italy), Androgynous, 2016, oil, gold leaf on linen, 50x40cm. Courtesy of the artist. Religion is at its best when it becomes a countercultural forc...
The Failure of Misanthropy

February 6, 2017 | Yahia Lababidi

Geoff Livingston, “America Is a Land of Immigrants,” Dulles International Airport, January 28, 2017 Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal used to say that he drew his worldview from a dry cleaner’s slip he cam...
Balancing Acts by Yahia Lababidi

May 2016
Yahia Lababidi

Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Press 53. 2016. 204 pages. Mystical and modern, Yahia Lababidi’s Balancing Acts, a collection of poems spanning across a career of decades, tethers together a...
The Books We Were

January 21, 2015 | Yahia Lababidi

Certain cherished books are like old loves. We didn’t part on bad terms; but it’s complicated, and would require too much effo...
Aphorisms on Art, Morality, and Spirit

July 25, 2012 | Yahia Lababidi

Aphorisms were the form that gave me the most relief, that offered the deepest bloodletting. In the aphorism, I didn’t have to say “I,” I could just let the thing speak itself, so I didn’t feel compr...