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Past Winners
TitleAuthorYearAward
Umbilical DiscordRawand Mustafa2024Winner
CoriolisA. D. Lauren-Abunassar2023Winner
How to Make an Algorithm in the MicrowaveMaya Salameh2022Winner
Like We Still SpeakDanielle Badra2021Winner
StripJessica Abughattas2020Winner
A Theory of BirdsZaina Alsous2019Winner
Our Earliest TattoosPeter Twal2018Winner
the magic my body becomesJess Rizkallah2017Winner

News

About the Series

Every year the University of Arkansas Press accepts submissions for the Etel Adnan Poetry Series and awards the $1,000 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize to a first or second book of poetry, in English, by a writer of Arab heritage. Since its inception in 2015 the series has sought to celebrate and foster the writings and writers that make up the vibrant and diverse Arab American community, and the University of Arkansas Press has long been committed to publishing diverse kinds of poetry by a diversity of poets. The series editors are Hayan Charara and Fady Joudah, and the prize is named in honor of the world-renowned poet, novelist, essayist, and artist Etel Adnan.

Though poets of Arab heritage have been writing in English for more than a century, little attention had been paid to these poets as a community. In 2008 the publication of Inclined to Speak, an anthology of contemporary Arab American poetry edited by Hayan Charara and published by the University of Arkansas Press, brought attention to the diversities and talents of this already established but growing group of poets. Since the anthology’s publication in 2008, many more new poets of Arab heritage have emerged, and their work continues to challenge and reinvent not only the aesthetics they have inherited but also the very notions of what it means to be Arab or Arab American. Hayan Charara and Fady Joudah, themselves celebrated poets, felt the time was ripe for a series that simultaneously valued the larger community to which these new poets belonged, as well as their engagement with new and innovative poetics.

 

About the Prize

The series editors serve as the judges for the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize in addition to the occasional guest judge appointed by the editors. Together, they will select a winning manuscript and write a preface for the book. The University of Arkansas Press, which will publish the book, provides that the author’s work will be produced with all the dedication and expertise they have to offer. This includes professional copyediting by expert poetry editors, design and production by veteran designers who specialize in the typesetting of verse, and production managed by a house with a history of printing first-rate books. Additionally, the author will receive a $1,000 prize and will widely publicize the winning book. We believe this offers the poet the best possible opportunity to connect with his or her audience via the printed word.

About the Editors

Hayan Charara

Hayan Charara

Series Coeditor

Hayan Charara is a poet, children’s book author, essayist, and editor. His poetry books are Something Sinister (2016), The Sadness of Others (2006), and The Alchemist’s Diary (2001). His children’s book, The Three Lucys (2016), received the New Voices Award Honor, and he edited Inclined to Speak (2008), an anthology of contemporary Arab American poetry. His honors include a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lucille Joy Prize in Poetry from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, the John Clare Prize, and the Arab American Book Award. 

Born in Detroit in 1972 to Arab immigrants, he studied biology and chemistry at Wayne State University before turning to poetry. He spent a decade in New York City, where he earned a master’s degree from New York University’s Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program. In 2004, he moved to Texas, where he eventually earned his PhD in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston. 

He has taught at a number of colleges and universities, including Queens College, Jersey City University, the City University of New York-La Guardia, the University of Texas at Austin, Trinity University, and Our Lady of the Lake University. He currently teaches in the Honors College and the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.

He is married, with two children.

(Photo by Rachel de Cordova)

Fady Joudah

Fady Joudah

Series Coeditor

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American physician, poet, and translator. He was born in Austin, Texas, and grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia. He was educated at the University of Georgia, the Medical College of Georgia, and the University of Texas Health Sciences in Houston. In 2002 and 2005 he worked with Doctors Without Borders in Zambia and Sudan, respectively.

Joudah’s debut collection of poetry, The Earth in the Attic (2008), won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, chosen by Louise Glück. Joudah followed his second book of poetry, Alight (2013) with Textu (2014), a collection of poems written on a cell phone wherein each piece is exactly 160 characters long. His fourth collection is Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance (2018). In 2014, Joudah was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. 

As critic Charles Bainbridge observed in a 2008 Guardian review of The Earth in the Attic, “Joudah’s poetry thrives on dramatic shifts in perspective, on continually challenging received notions.”

Joudah translated several collections of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s work in The Butterfly’s Burden (2006), which won the Banipal prize from the UK and was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; and in If I Were Another, which won a PEN USA award in 2010. His translation of Ghassan Zaqtan‘s Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me (2012) won the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2013. His other translations include Amjad Nasser‘s Petra: The Concealed Rose and A Map of Signs and Scents.

Joudah lives with his family in Houston, where he works as a physician of internal medicine.

(Photo by Cybele Knowles)

Farid Matuk

Farid Matuk

2025 Guest Judge

Farid Matuk was born in Peru to a Syrian mother and a Peruvian father, and has lived in the U.S. since the age of six. Matuk is the author of the book-arts project Redolent (2021), made in collaboration with Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez. He is the author of This Isa Nice Neighborhood (2010), finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award, and chosen by Geoffrey G. O’Brien for recognition in the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets series. He has also published the chapbooks Is it the King? (2006), Riverside (2011), and My Daughter La Chola (2013). His translations from Spanish have appeared in Kadar Koli, Bombay Gin, Translation Review, and Mandorla. He is a contributor to Scubadivers and Chrysanthemums: Essays on the Poetry of Araki Yasusada (2011), American Odysseys: Writings by New Americans (2013).

Matuk currently serves as poetry editor for FENCE and contributing editor forThe Volta. The recipient of Ford and Fulbright fellowships, Matuk earned an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at University of Texas-Austin. He lives in Arizona.

(Photo by Robert Bear Guerra.)

About Etel Adnan

Etel Adnan

Etel Adnan

Honoree

Born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1925, Etel Adnan was educated in the French schools there and later studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, the University of California Berkeley, and Harvard. She became a painter during the Algerian War of Independence and later, during the war in Vietnam, participated in the poets’ movement against the war, becoming, in her own words, “an American poet.” From 1972 until 1976, she lived in Beirut and worked as a cultural editor for two newspapers. Her novel Sitt Marie-Rose, published in 1977, has since been translated into numerous languages and is considered a classic of war literature. In 1977 she established her residence in Sausalito, California, with frequent stays in Paris.

Adnan has published nearly twenty books in English, including The Arab Apocalypse, regarded as “one of the most important works of literature” after the Lebanese Civil War; In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country, “a mix of prose, poetry, political insight, philosophic speculation, and historical remembrance honed to mineral perfection”; and Sea and Fog, winner of the Lambda Literary Award. She is the winner, with translator Sarah Riggs, of the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize for collection Time. Her poetry and prose has been recognized internationally and includes the France-Pays Arabes Award, the California Book Award, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the Arab American Book Award, and a lifetime achievement award from the Radius of Arab American Writers. In 2014 she was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. The same year, a collection of her paintings and tapestries were exhibited as a part of the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. MELUS, the journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, called Adnan “arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today.”

She lived in Paris with her partner, the painter and sculptor Simone Fattal, until her death in 2021. More about Adnan is available at www.eteladnan.com.