Elmaz Abinader

Elmaz Abinader
Born 1954
Pennsylvania, United States
Occupation Professor, Writer, Poet, Performer
Nationality American
Period Contemporary
Genre Poet, Memoirist, Performer, Writer, Educator
Subject Literature and Art
Literary movement Ethnic American Poetry
Website
www.elmazabinader.com

Elmaz Abinader (born 1954 in Pennsylvania) is an Arab-American author, poet, performer, English professor at Mills College and co-founder of the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA). In 2000, she received the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for her poetry collection In the Country of My Dreams....

Life

Born in a small coal mining community in southwest Pennsylvania, she lived with her parents and her five siblings in a household strongly rooted in Lebanese tradition. Her childhood was spent helping out in her family store, attending Catholic church twice a day, and focusing on her schooling. Abinader and her siblings faced challenges due to their ethnicity.[1]

Abinader received her B.A. in Writing and Communication from University of Pittsburgh in 1974. It was during this time that she embrace her heritage and wrote about her family’s history. She earned her MFA in Poetry from Columbia University, School of the Arts Poetry Writing, in 1978. In 1985, she completed her PhD program at the University of Nebraska, English Fiction and Non-fiction Writing, where she taught English and creative writing.

Work

Abinader's first book, Children of the Roojme: A Family's Journey from Lebanon (Norton, 1991, University of Wisconsin, 1997), was published in 1997. This book, a memoir, crosses three generations of Lebanese and covers the challenges of finding a home away from their country. Her second publication, In the Country of My Dreams..., is a collections of poetry focused on dislocation and its various forms. This collection won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for Multi-cultural Poetry in 2000 and a Goldies Award for Literature. Along with her books, she has written and performed in several one-woman plays: Under The Ramadan Moon, Country of Origin, 32 Mohammeds, Voices From the Siege, and The Torture Quartet. Her play Country of Origin was performed at The Kennedy Center in 2009.[2] Her plays have also been performed

Her passion for Abinader co-founded The Voices of our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA), which holds workshops for writers of color, during the summer at the University of California Berkeley in 1999. Abinader is currently teaching creative writing at Mills College.

Bibliography

Books

Performances

Awards and residencies

References

  1. ↑ "Voices from the Gaps". University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts. Retrieved 22 December 2016.
  2. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2013-10-03. Retrieved 2013-10-15.
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