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Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Thérèse Soukar Chehade made her way to Massachusetts in August of 1983, eight years after the start of the Lebanese civil war. The heat was a surprise, hotter than she imagined for this part of the world. But then the seasons changed, the temperature dropped, and the leaves turned to a riot of color. In that beautiful transformation, she found a measure of peace, knowing she was far from the war still ravaging her homeland.
Writing had always been her dream. Fluent in Arabic and French, her English was serviceable, but it lacked the richness she sought. She dove into English literature, finding inspiration in the works of Nabokov and Woolf. With the tenacity of a polyglot and the resilience of an immigrant, she decided to write in English, not fully grasping the enormity of the challenge.
Enrolling in the MFA program at UMass, Amherst, Thérèse began working on a novel. She soon realized that writing in a new language was more than just mastering grammar and vocabulary; it was about absorbing a new sensibility. She had to tame her love for the figurative language of Arabic and the long, winding sentences of 19th-century French literature. The war, the memories she thought she left behind, crept into her stories, and she let them stay.
Her first novel, Loom, came out in 2010 from Syracuse University Press and won the Arab American Book Award for fiction the following year. It tells the story of the Zaydan family, caught between their memories of Lebanon's civil war and a fierce Vermont blizzard. Her latest work, We Walked On, published by Regal House Publishing in September 2024, returns to Lebanon. It follows Hisham, a thirty-year-old Arabic teacher, and Rita, his fourteen-year-old student, as their lives are upended by the civil war. The novel was a 2022 Noemi Press Prose Award semifinalist and was longlisted for the 2022 Dzanc Prize for Fiction.
Now settled in Granby, Massachusetts, Thérèse Soukar Chehade continues to weave her past into her present.