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Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, U.C. Berkeley, and at Harvard, and taught at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, from 1958-1972. In 1972, she returned to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers. Her novel Sitt Marie-Rose, published in Paris in 1977, won the France-Pays Arabes award and has been translated into more than ten languages. In 1977, Adnan re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, with frequent stays in Paris. Adnan is the author of more than a dozen books in English, including Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986); The Arab Apocalypse (1989); In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005); and Sea and Fog (2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry; and Night (2016). To look at the sea it to become what one is, a two-volume collection of writing, was published in 2014, the same year she was awarded France's l'Ordre de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. Her poems have been put to music by Tania Leon, Henry Treadgill, Gavin Bryars, Zad Moultaka, Annea Lockwood, and Bun Ching Lam. Exhibitions of her paintings have been mounted at The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Museum der Moderne Salzburg; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; and the Serpentine Galleries, London.
"""Surge, as the title suggests, is a book awash in movement: the movement of mind, of time and of memory. It presents an old poet at home, at night, roving through her recollections of dead or dying friends, landscapes passed through or lost. She muses on unresolvable ideas that have flickered at the edge of perception for countless sleepless nights.""—Ian Malaney, The Irish Times """"In perception, redemption,” Adnan declares in this assemblage of mystical, metaphysical ideas and aphorisms, often in conversation with the dead. “We have to say yes to that fate,” she writes of mortality, “and it’s hard, the hardest."""" —Matt Flegenheimer, The New York Times ""Adnan’s poetics brings the feminine power of the undetermined, casting language around what cannot, ultimately, be made certain. With skill, she uses words to obscure fixed notions of what it is to be a person, to experience pain, to think about it, and refracts thought matter back to the light of the moon. “That kind of motion,” she writes, “alters the world.”""—Alisha Mascarenhas, Poetry Project Newsletter #258 ""Rather than pin down or bemoan our lack of perceptual surety, Adnan builds a nebula for readers to drift about. Her pages are a place for us to submerge, to question ourselves and each other even as we want to reach out and affirm that yes, we saw some nice fish down there—the colors really set off the light.""—K.B. Thors, Lambda Literary ""In Surge, a new book of (mostly) taut prose formations, what she is thinking about at 93 seems to be the whole range of life on earth, explored with a more palpable sense of mortality than perhaps she could have expressed at 43 or 53… The action of the book is like a sewing machine: jabbing deeply and decisively into a subject and then quickly moving on.""—Katharine Coldiron, VIDA ""By looking out at the universe, we are looking into ourselves. By naming that shimmering, we are piecing ourselves together. Adnan has given us a new way of thinking through ourselves and the world, our place in the universe.""—Emma Ramadan, Full Stop ""As a wave does. Of the sea, of emotion, of thinking. Meaning crests, blinks, and submits to the vast and chaotic flow of thought. Nothing stays. The workings of the mind keep happening. Etel Adnan’s long poem, Surge, published through Nightboat Press this summer, attunes to such a motion; humbling itself to the forces beyond a singular subjectivity. It is a philosophical succession of aphoristic thoughts, turning its reader in on herself and back out again; visiting questions of being, of perception, with the rigour of a thinker who has lived a deeply curious life.""—Alisha Mascarenhas, The Poetry Project Newsletter"
