Radwa Ashour graduated from Cairo University with a BA in 1967, and MA. in 1972, and from University of Massachusetts Amherst with a Ph.D. in African American Literature in 1975.[2]Her dissertation was titled: The search for a Black poetics: a study of Afro-American critical writings. She teaches at Ain Shams University, Cairo. She married Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti in 1970. She won the 2007 Constantine Cavafy Prize for Literature.