El Habib Louai

El Habib Louai is a Moroccan Amazigh poet, translator, musician and professor of English language and literature at the English department at Ibn Zohr University, Agadir, Morocco. He is a contributing member of The European Beat Studies Network. Louai has been awarded Aimee Grunberger scholarship by Naropa University to participate in Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics summer creative writing program, where he performed his Arabic translations of the Beats with Anne Waldman, Ambrose Bye and Thurston Moore of the Sonic Youth. His articles, poems, and translations of Moroccan and Beat writers appeared in many national and international literary magazines, journals, and reviews such as World Literature Today, The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature, Xenophile Journal, Beatdom Journal, Mogadored, Madarat Attaqafiya, Arab Lit Quarterly, Rigorous Journal, Faultline Journal of Arts and Letters, Big Bridge Magazine, Militant Thistles, The Fifth Estate, Al Quds Al Arabi, Arrafid, Al Faisal, Sagarana, Istanbul Literary Review, Pirene’s Fountain, the Tower Journal, Charles River Journal, Al Doha, Lumina, The MUD Proposal, the Dreaming Machine. He published two collections of poems: Mrs. Jones Will Now Know: Poems of a Desperate Rebel and Rotten Wounds Embalmed with Tar. His Arabic translations include Michael Rothenberg’s Indefinite Detention: A Dog Story, America, America: An anthology of the Beat Poetry, Bob Kaufman’s The Ancient Rain, Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters and Giorgio Agamben’s What is an Apparatus and Other Essays. Louai’s Rotten Wounds Embalmed with Tar was shortlisted for 2020 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry.

His latest article published by Beatdom can be found here: A Restless Quest for Spiritual Freedom: Jack Kerouac, Hoboism, Zen Buddhism, and the Fellaheen Ethos.