Fargo Tbakhi
Palestinian American writer and performance artist
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fargo Tbakhi (born 1997) is a Palestinian American writer, poet, and performance artist. His debut poetry collection, TERROR COUNTER (2025), was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry.[1][2][3]
- Writer
- poet
- performance artist
Fargo Tbakhi | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1997 (age 28–29) |
| Occupation |
|
| Alma mater | Arizona State University |
| Genre | |
| Notable works | TERROR COUNTER |
| Notable awards | National Book Award for Poetry longlist (2025) |
Career and reception
Tbakhi moved to Phoenix, Arizona, when he was 12, and later studied theater at Arizona State University.[4] His one-person show My Father, My Martyr, and Me grew out of his thesis project and was profiled by ASU News in 2020.[4] The performance was later staged at the Capital Fringe Festival in 2022[5] and at Rhizome DC in 2023.[6]
His short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons and Apex Magazine, and his essays and criticism have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Protean.[7][8][9][10] He is a recipient of the Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Prize.[11]
Deep Vellum published Tbakhi's debut poetry collection, TERROR COUNTER, in 2025.[12] The book was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry.[3] In its summer 2025 books preview, Vulture highlighted the collection's formal experimentation, including the "Gazan tunnel", and described the poems as seeking a lyric mode beyond reductive political narratives while holding together survival, care, and collective liberation.[13]
Tbakhi's short story "Root Rot" has received critical attention.[14] It was included in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022, edited by Rebecca Roanhorse with series editor John Joseph Adams,[15] and a Strange Horizons review of the anthology called it "the single best piece on offer".[16]