| Elia Abu Madi | |
|---|---|
| Born | Īlīyā Abū Māḍī 1889 or 1890 Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate |
| Died | 1957 |
| Occupation | poet, journalist, publisher |
| Genres | poetry |
| Literary movement | Mahjar, New York Pen League |
Elia Abu Madi (also known as Elia D. Madey; Arabic: إيليا أبو ماضي —Īlīyā Abū Māḍī) (1889 or 1890 – 23 November 1957) was a Lebanese-American poet.
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Abu Madi was born in the village of Al-Muhaydithah, now part of Bikfaya, Lebanon, in 1889 or 1890. At the age of 11 he moved to Alexandria, Egypt where he worked with his uncle, a small businessman.
In 1911, Elia Abu Madi published his first collection of poems, Tazkar al-Madi. That same year he left Egypt for the United States, where he settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1916 he moved to New York and began a career in journalism. In New York Abu Madi met and worked with a number of Arab-American poets including Kahlil Gibran. He married the daughter of Najib Diyab, editor of the Arabic-language magazine Mirat al-Gharb, and became the chief editor of that publication in 1918. His second poetry collection, Diwan Iliya Abu Madi, was published in New York in 1919; his third and most important collection, Al-Jadawil ("The Streams"), appeared in 1927. His other books were Al-Khama'il (1940) and Tibr wa Turab (posthumous, 1960).
In 1929 Abu Madi founded his own periodical, Al-Samir, in Brooklyn. It began as a monthly but after a few years appeared five times a week.
His poems are very well known among Arabs; journalist Gregory Orfalea wrote that "his poetry is as commonplace and memorized in the Arab world as that of Robert Frost is in ours."[1]