Role: Author

Alicia Erian is the author of a short story collection, The Brutal Language of Love. Her work has appeared in Playboy, Zoetrope, Nerve, The Iowa Review, and other publications. This is her first novel.

I was born in the historic city of Aleppo in northern Syria and grew up in Beirut, Lebanon. For many centuries Arabs, Armenians, Assyrians, Jews, Kurds and other nationalities have lived in these cities as neighbors, business partners, friends and relatives. The sounds, smells, colors of the souks of Aleppo as well as the voices of the street peddlers echoing through the narrow cobblestone streets of the old city are still alive in me today. Lebanon–the land of the ancient Phoenicians, an international crossroad, where east meets west on the shores of the blue Mediterranean–has been my patrimony as a diasporan Armenian.\