Hala Alyan (; born July 27, 1986) is a Palestinian-American writer, poet, and clinical psychologist who specializes in trauma, addiction, and cross-cultural behavior. She is the author of the novels Salt Houses (2017) and The Arsonists' City (2021), and the memoir I'll Tell You When I'm Home (2025).
Her honors include an Arab American Book Award (2013), the Dayton Literary Peace Prize (2018), and the GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Non-Fiction (2026); her memoir was longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography (2025).
Hala Alyan was born in Carbondale, Illinois, on July 27, 1986. Her family lived in Kuwait after her birth but sought political asylum in the United States when Iraqi forces invaded the country.
She graduated from the American University of Beirut and from Columbia University. She received her doctorate in clinical psychology at Rutgers University and is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Applied Psychology at New York University. She and her husband live in Brooklyn, New York.
Alyan's work has been published in a range of journals and literary magazines, including The New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Guernica, and Jewish Currents, among others. Examples of her poems published online include "Meals" (The Missouri Review) and "Honeymoon" (Poetry).
In her first novel, Salt Houses, Alyan follows multiple generations of the fictional Yacoub family, tracing their lives across decades and major regional upheavals, including displacement following the Six-Day War of 1967 and later disruption during the 1990 Gulf War.
In 2018, Alyan's novel Salt Houses won the Arab American Book Award (Adult fiction) presented by the Arab American National Museum. That year, she also won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and in the fall she was a visiting fellow at the American Library in Paris.
Her second novel, The Arsonists' City, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on March 9, 2021, and received positive reviews.
In 2026, Alyan won the GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Non-Fiction for her memoir IâÂÂll Tell You When IâÂÂm Home, which was longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography in 2025.
Wael Salam. (2022) The Burden of the Past: Memories, Resistance and Existence in Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin and Hala Alyan's Salt Houses. Interventions 24:1, pages 31âÂÂ48.
Wael Salam. (2022) The Palestinian Re-experience of Historical Violence: âÂÂA Wound Never Completely Scabbed OverâÂÂ. English Studies 103:1, pages 94âÂÂ112.
Salam, Wael J., and Safi Mahfouz. âÂÂClaims of memory: Transgenerational traumas,: fluid identities, and resistance in Hala AlyanâÂÂs Salt Houses.â Journal of Postcolonial Writing 56, no. 3 (2020): 296âÂÂ309.