Etel Adnan
| Etel Adnan | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Ethel Adnan 24 February 1925 Beirut, Lebanon |
| Nationality | Lebanese American |
| Genre | Poetry, Essay, Visual arts |
| Website | |
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Etel Adnan (born 24 February 1925 in Beirut, Lebanon) is a Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist. In 2003, Adnan was named "arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today" by the academic journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.
Besides her literary output, Adnan continues to produce visual works in a vareity of media, such as oil paintings, films and tapestries, which have been exhibited at galleries across the world.
She lives in Paris and Sausalito, California.
Etel Adnan was born in 1925 in Beirut, Lebanon. Adnan's mother was a Christian Greek from Smyrna and her father was Muslim Syrian and a petty officer. Though she grew up speaking Greek and Turkish in a primarily Arabic-speaking society, she was educated at French convent schools and French became the language in which her early work was first written. She also studied English in her youth, and most of her later work has been first written in this language.
At 24, Adnan traveled to Paris where she received a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne. She then traveled to America where she continued graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley and at Harvard University. From 1952 to 1978, she taught philosophy of art at the Dominican University of California in San Rafael. She has also lectured at many universities throughout the United States.
Adnan returned from America to Lebanon and worked as a journalist and cultural editor for Al-Safa, a French-language newspaper in Beirut. In addition, she also helped build the cultural section of the newspaper, occasionally contributing cartoons and illustrations. Her tenure at Al-Safa was most notable for her front-page editorials, commenting on the important political issues of the day.
In her later years, Adnan began to openly identify as lesbian.
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