Poet, philosopher and artist, Kahlil Gibran was born in 1883 near Mount Lebanon, a region that has produced many prophets. His poetry has been translated into more than twenty languages. His drawings and paintings have been exhibited in the great capitals of the world and compared by Auguste Rodin to the work of William Blake. Kahlil Gibran died in 1931.

Poet, philosopher and artist, Kahlil Gibran was born near Mount Lebanon. The millions of Arabic-speaking peoples familiar with his writings in that language consider him the genius of his age, but his fame and influence spread far beyond the Near East. His poetry has been translated into more than twenty languages and his drawings and paintings have been exhibited all over the world.

His many works include The Prophet, his masterpiece of religious inspiration; The Garden of the Prophet; The Storm: Stories and Prose Poems; The Beloved: Reflections on the Path of the Heart; Jesus: The Son of Man; The Voice of Kahlil Gibran, an anthology of his writings; The Vision: Reflections on the Way of the Soul; and Spirit Brides. He was for many years the leader of a Lebanese literary circle in New York, where he died in 1931.

Suheil Bushrui is the foremost translator and interpreter of Anglo-Irish literature in the Arab world, and has published critical studies in Arabic and English on W. B. Yeats, John Millington Synge, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.

He was the first Arab national to be appointed to the Chair of English and Anglo-Irish Literature at the American University of Beirut, and has also served as Chairman of the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature (ISAIL). He is currently the Baha'i Chair for World Peace in the Center for International Development and Conflict Management (CIDCM) at the University of Maryland.