Raja-e Busailah was born in 1929 and raised in Jerusalem, Palestine. During infancy he lost his sight. In 1948, he was expelled, along with his people, from Palestine. He majored in English at the University of Cairo and later obtained a master’s degree in special education at Hunter College in New York. He holds a Ph.D. in English language and literature from New York University. He is currently professor emeritus. He taught English at Indiana University, Kokomo, for some thirty years, as well as at Birzeit University, West Bank, Palestine, and on a Fulbright to the University of King Muhammad V in Rabat, Morocco. In the 1950s, he took part in founding a school for the blind in Kuwait where he taught for two years. After the Israeli invasion in 1967, he started Project Loving Care, a program designed to help financially needy Palestinian children living in Palestine, and was director for twenty-five years. He is a published poet with a YouTube channel for his poetry, and in addition to publishing his poetry in a number of magazines, his works have been anthologized in The Ordeal (1977), We Begin Here (2007), and Before There is Nowhere to Stand (2012). His book of poems We are Human (1985) deals with the Palestine condition.
