A couple of years ago — almost exactly — I got invited to visit a classroom of Emirti women who were studying young adult lit in Abu Dhabi. They were working on writing a children’s story, and the teacher wanted me to talk to them about creative writing and to walk them through some exercises. But I also found out they were reading Naomi Shihab Nye’s novel Habibi, and on a whim, I contacted the author. (She lives in San Antonio, near where I grew up. I liked to think we shared something.) To my great delight, she replied, and we swapped a few emails about writing and what the Emirati women were working on. I found Nye beautifully generous and encouraging.
You should read this poem, “A Well Traveled Woman,” that is going viral. You can see her generosity, and her beauty.
Samuel Snoek-Brown 
I do love the poem. It has the same narrative quality that I find in your writing (though your fiction and her poetry are different in so many other ways). Some poems teeter on the edge of prose; the register and lexicon of this poem is very prose-like, and indeed if she set it in paragraphs instead of lines it could pass as prose. But it just… isn’t! It’s poetry, and that’s that. 🙂