(1925- )

Poet, writer, and painter, Etel Adnan was born in Beirut Lebanon in 1925. An only child with an active imagination, Adnan was her own best company. She attended convent school until her education was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I which began when she was 16 years old. During the war, she worked for the French Information Bureau and after some time was able to attend classes in preparation for the baccalaureate. She passed with high honors and hoped to attend  engineering school, as she loved creating things. Her mother disapproved of her daughter pursuing what she considered man’s work and so Etel attended the newly opened École Superieur des Lettres. It was here that Etel fell in love with philosophy and literature. Her first paper for her class was submitted by a friend to the newspaper Le Jour and published in their literary section before she even turned it in to her professor. Etel was offered a scholarship to study philosophy at the Sorbonne, an opportunity that she did not take until three years later, in 1950, when she went to Paris. Five years later she moved to the Unites States and continued her studies at Berkeley and Harvard. She taught philosophy at Dominican College in San Rafael, California from 1959-1972. During this time, she also began publishing, releasing her first volume of poetry, Moonshot, in 1966. Since then, Adnan has published 8 books including the poetry collections Five Senses for One Death (1971), Jebu et l’Express Beyrouth-Enfer (1973), L’Apocalypse Arabe (1980), Pablo Neruda is a Banana Tree (1982), From A to Z (1982), and The Indian Never Had a Horse (1985) as well as two books written in prose, Sitt Marie Rose (1978) and “essay in the tradition of Siddharta’ Journey to Mount Tamalpais” (1986). In 1976 she began work as the literary editor of L’Orient-Le Jour, a Beirut daily publication. Etel Adnan left Lebanon in 1976 and currently spends her time in Paris and Sausalito, California.