Kareem has received numerous awards, fellowships, honors, and residencies for his work as a translator and a scholar, including PEN Center USA's 2017 Translation Prize, the 2022 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation, a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts translation grant, the 2015 Northern California Book Award for Best Translated Poetry, Poetry Magazine's 2014 translation prize, a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Germany, a CASA Fellowship in Cairo, and residencies from the Lannan Foundation and the Banff Centre for the Arts. He has also twice been a finalist for the PEN America Translation Prize: once for poetry (2022) and once for prose (2017).
Translation Awards
- 2018: Joint Recipient, PEN Translates Award, UK (Book of Cairo)
- 2015: Joint Recipient, PEN Translates Award, UK (Book of Khartoum)
- 2014 Northern California Book Award (Best Translated Prose): Finalist
Translation Residencies
- 2014: Lannan Foundation Residency in Marfa, Texas
- 2012: Banff International Literary Translation Center residency in Alberta, Canada
Translation Service
- 2024: BIPOC Open-Language Translation Mentor for the American Literary Translators Association. Mentee: Munawwar Abdulla, working with modern Uyghur fiction.
- 2023: Mentor for the Yiddish Book Center. Mentee: Daniel Kraft, working with 20th-century Yiddish poetry.
- 2022: Open-Language Translation Mentor for the American Literary Translators Association. Mentee: Priyamvada Ramkumar, working with contemporary Tamil fiction.
- 2022: Member of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Advisory Board.
- 2022: Advisor and consultant for the Room to Read international literacy organization.
- 2021-2022: Mentor for the Ireland-based "Play It Forward" Fellowship Programme, in conjunction with Skein Press. Mentee: Iraqi-born poet Majed Mujed. Funded by the Arts Council of Ireland.
- 2021: Open-Language Translation Mentor for the American Literary Translators Association. Mentee: Alex Braslavsky, working with modern Polish poetry.
- 2021: Member of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Advisory Board.
- 2020: Open-Genre Arabic Translation Mentor for the American Literary Translators Association. Mentee: Madeline Edwards, working with contemporary Arabic prose.
- 2018/19: Open-Language Translation Mentor for the American Literary Translators Association. Mentee: Dr. Jennifer Kellogg, working with modern Greek poetry.
Research Awards and Fellowships
- 2013: Center for Middle Eastern Studies Sultan Grant, UC Berkeley (research in Arabic and Islamic Studies)
- 2006 – 2011: Berkeley Fellowship (the top graduate humanities fellowship at UC Berkeley)
- 2006 – 2009: Townsend Center Discovery Fellowship (interdisciplinary research at UC Berkeley)
- 2005/6: CASA Fellowship at the American University in Cairo, Egypt (Arabic studies)
- 2003/4: Fulbright Fellowship for research in Mannheim, Germany
- 2003/4: Fulbright Enterprise Fellowship for research in Mannheim, Germany
- 2003/4: DAAD Fellowship for research in Germany (declined in favor of the Fulbright)
- 2003: Inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Honors Society