JEAN SAID MAKDISI is a Palestinian writer and scholar. She was born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian family and was raised in Cairo, Egypt, before leaving to study in the U.S. In 1972, Makdisi and her family moved from the United States, where they had lived since 1962, to Beirut, Lebanon, where she taught English and humanities at Beirut University College. They remained in Beirut throughout the Lebanese Civil War and the massive Israeli invasion of Lebanon in1982. Her observations of Beirut’s decline would inform her first book, the memoir Beirut Fragments, published by Persea Books in 1990. In 2005, she published Teta, Mother, and Me, An Arab Woman’s Memoir (London: Saqi Books), which was published the following year (Norton) as Teta, Mother and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women.
