Lighthouse for the Drowning

Jawdat Fakhreddine was born in 1953 in a small village in southern Lebanon. A professor of Arabic literature at the Lebanese University in Beirut, he is one of the major Lebanese names in Modern Arabic Poetry, and is considered one of the second generation poets of the modernist movement in the Arab world. He earned an MA in Physics and taught at the high school level for more than 10 years. During this time he published a number of poetry collections and was encouraged by Adonis to work on a PhD in Arabic literature. Fakhreddine intermittently publishes articles and new poems in al-Hayat newspaper, which is an Arab newspaper published in London and distributed worldwide, and in as-Safir, one of the two major Lebanese Newspapers. He writes a weekly article in al-Khaleej newspaper, a widely distributed gulf daily newspaper. He currently lives in Beirut, Lebanon.

Jayson Iwen is a poet, novelist, editor, translator, and recipient of numerous literary honors, including an Academy of American Poets Award, the Emergency Press International Book Award, the Cleveland State University Poetry Center's Ruthanne Willey Memorial Novella Award, and a Hewlett Foundation grant. His writing has appeared in over thirty different journals, with the most recent work reprinted in The &Now Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing. His published books are Six Trips in Two Directions (2006), A Momentary Jokebook (2008), and Gnarly Wounds (2013). His edited collection of poems by Jawdat Haydar, 101 Selected Poems, has been translated into French and published by Editions Dar An-Nahar. Iwen also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the online journal New Theory. He currently lives in Duluth, MN.

Huda Fakhreddine is a specialist in Arabic literature. Her work focuses on modernist movements or trends in Arabic poetry and their relationship to the Arabic literary tradition. Her book Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) is a study of the modernist poetry of the twentieth century Free Verse movement and the Abbasid mudath movement, as periods of literary crisis and meta-poetic reflection. She holds an MA in English literature from the American University of Beirut and a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Indiana University, Bloomington. She currently lives in Philadelphia, PA.