Though Nye recalls often being overwhelmed by culture shock, her yearlong stay was powerfully formative. In Sinjil, Nye met Sitti Khadra, her paternal grandmother, whose influences now ripple throughout Nye's work. Sitti Khadra was 78 when Nye arrived, and until her death at age 106 she and Nye shared a close relationship. (Sitti is a commonly used affectionate name for a grandmother.)

"My Sitti Khadra and I bonded at first sight," Nye remembers.

"I think we recognized that we had the same kind of humor. It was a wordless humor that worked even better than language for us. Though I studied Arabic there, though I know many words and understand much when other people are talking, my Sitti and T communicated in a sort of familial pidgin: gestures, bouquets of disconnected words. My father and miscellaneous cousins served as translators, but we really didn't need them." The sign language, shared laughter and tears were "quite melodious."

Their ties deepened that year when Nye came down with a severe fever that baffled physicians. On the fourth day, Sitti arrived at the house, angry that she hadn't been notified earlier. She prayed over her granddaughter, whose body lay outlined with a hundred silver straight pins. Nye recovered quickly, and she recalls sitting up in bed and demanding hummus. While some in the family reasoned that her fever had merely run its natural course, Nye credits the healing to Sitti.

Years later, on one of Nye's many family visits to Sinjil, Sitti Khadra sat in front of Michael's camera for several portraits. One became the cover of Nye's Words Under the Words. The title poem of the book reads:

My grandmother's hands recognize grapes, the damp shine of a goat's new skin.

When I was sick they followed me, I woke from the long fever to find them covering my head like cool prayers. My grandmother's days are made of bread, a round pat-pat and the slow baking. She waits by the oven watching a strange car circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son lost to America.

Nye's first venture out of poetry and into fiction came last October, when Simon and Schuster released her autobiographical novel for young readers, Habibi, which is Arabic for "dear one" or "my dear." It tells the story of Liyana, a 14-year-old who moves from the United States to Jerusalem. "I rewrote it six times," Nye confesses. "As a poet, T don't worry about a plot, I just look at life around me. For this, I had to have action and tension."

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