Muin Bseiso

Mu'in Tawfiq Bseiso was a Palestinian poet who lived in Egypt, where he first entered the world of poetry. He finished his primary and secondary education in Gaza in 1948. He started publishing his work in the Jaffa-based magazine Al-Hurriya, where he published his first poems in 1946. Two years later, in 1948, he enrolled in the American University in Cairo and subsequently graduated in 1952. His dissertation was titled "The Spoken or Head Word in Lower Eastern Broadcast Media", discussing the borders between radio and TV on one hand and the printed newspaper media on the other. He became involved with democratic and national work early on in his life, and later dedicated himself to poetry and teaching. On January 27, 1952 he published his first work titled Al-Ma'raka. He published several other volumes of poetry: Palestine in the Heart, (1964), Trees Die Standing (1966). He was imprisoned in Egyptian jails in Gaza twice: 1955 to 1957 and 1959 to 1963. In one of them he met his future wife, Sahbaa al-Barbari, one of the first women communists in Gaza. He lived in exile after the Israeli conquest of the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Six-Day War.