Etel Adnan Poetry Prize
Noemi Press accepts submissions for the Etel Adnan Poetry Series and awards the $2,000 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize to a first or second book of poetry, in English, by a writer of Arab heritage. The prize is open each fall in September. The 2025 Guest Judge will be Farid Matuk.
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. Hayan Charara and Fady Joudah serve as editors and founders of the series. The prize is named in honor of the world-renowned poet, novelist, essayist, and artist Etel Adnan.
In 2025, the Etel Adnan Prize moved to Noemi Press. Given Noemi’s mission of creating daring poetry that counters the status quo and nurtures voices from marginalized communities, this collaboration is one of communal strength and passion. Additionally, in an effort to amplify the prize winners across readerships, Noemi Press has begun a partnership with Out-Spoken Press to publish Adnan series winners in the UK.
History of the Prize
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. From 2015 to 2024, the prize was published through the University of Arkansas Press.
Past Winners
| Title | Author | Year |
| Umbilical Cord | Rawand Mustafa | 2024 |
| Coriolis | A. D. Lauren-Abunassar | 2023 |
| How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave | Maya Salameh | 2022 |
| Like We Still Speak | Danielle Badra | 2021 |
| Strip | Jessica Abughattas | 2020 |
| A Theory of Birds | Zaina Alsous | 2019 |
| Our Earliest Tattoos | Peter Twal | 2018 |
| the magic my body becomes | Jess Rizkallah | 2017 |
About the Series Editors and Guest Judge
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.
Fady Joudah
Series Coeditor
Fady Joudah is the author of […]. He has also published six collections of poems: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received the Jackson Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.
Farid Matuk
2025 Guest Judge
Farid Matuk is the author of Moon Mirrored Indivisible (University of Chicago Press, 2025); Redolent (Singing Saw Press, 2021); The Real Horse (University of Arizona Press, 2018); This Is a Nice Neighborhood(Letter Machine Editions, 2010); and My Daughter La Chola (Ahsahta Press, 2013). They are also the translator from the Spanish of The Hormone of Darkness: A Playlist (Graywolf, 2024) by the Peruvian poet Tilsa Otta. Matuk’s work has been supported by residencies from the Headlands Center for the Arts, a visiting Holloway Lectureship in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley, and a 2024 USA Fellowship from United States Artists.
Etel Adnan and Her Legacy
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.
