Pauline Kaldas is the author of nine books across fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and literary anthologies, including the forthcoming The Apricot Tree (Black Lawrence Press, 2026). Her work moves across forms but remains rooted in a shared set of concerns: migration, language, memory, and the shifting idea of home between Egypt and the United States.
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Her novel The Measure of Distance (2023) traces generations shaped by departure and return, while her earlier short story collection The Time Between Places (2010) and essay collection Looking Both Ways (2017) explore the intimate negotiations of identity and belonging. In Letters from Cairo (2007), she returns to Egypt as both insider and outsider, capturing the texture of daily life through a hybrid of memoir and observation, and in Egyptian Compass (2006), her poetry maps the emotional geography between two worlds.
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Alongside her creative work, Kaldas has contributed significantly to shaping conversations around multicultural writing. Her textbook Writing the Multicultural Experience (2022) brings craft and identity into dialogue, while her co-edited anthologies Beyond Memory (2020) and Dinarzad’s Children (2009) gather a wide range of Arab American voices. Across genres, her books form an interconnected body of work that reflects not just movement between places, but the ongoing effort to live within more than one language, culture, and sense of self.