About this Event
Lamartine Art Gallery & Creative Lab is honored to welcome May Rihani, distinguished Lebanese American author, poet, educator, and advocate for women’s empowerment, for an intimate conversation about her life, her work, and her new book, من أوراقي: إبداع ثقافي وتحديات سياسية.
May Rihani’s story is also part of an extraordinary Lebanese intellectual legacy, one that stretches from the mountain town of Freike to the United States and across the Arab world.
She is the daughter of Albert Ferris Rihani and the niece of the celebrated writer, philosopher, traveler, and reformer Ameen Rihani (1876–1940), one of the foundational figures of Arab American literature and a leading voice of the Arab Nahda.
Ameen Rihani belonged simultaneously to Lebanon, the Arab world, and America. Writing in both Arabic and English, he sought to create an intellectual bridge between East and West at a time when such cultural dialogue was still uncommon. His writings addressed literature, philosophy, freedom, social reform, Arab identity, politics, and the possibility of greater understanding between civilizations. His groundbreaking The Book of Khalid, published in New York in 1911, became an important landmark in Arab American literature.
But the Rihani legacy did not end with Ameen.
Following Ameen’s death, his younger brother Albert Ferris Rihani, May’s father, assumed an important role as a guardian of his brother’s intellectual heritage. In 1953, Albert established the Ameen Rihani Museum in the family home in Freike, preserving manuscripts, correspondence, books, artworks, photographs, and personal objects connected to Ameen’s remarkable life. Through that act of preservation, an individual literary legacy became an institution of cultural memory.
May Rihani represents another generation of that tradition.
Yet she has not simply inherited the Rihani name. She has developed an intellectual and public path distinctly her own. Where Ameen Rihani crossed geographical and philosophical borders between East and West, May Rihani has spent much of her career crossing borders through education, literature, international development, and advocacy for women and girls.
Over several decades, she worked across more than 40 countries, helping advance educational reform and opportunities for girls and women. She served as Co Chair of the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative and became an international voice for the principle that educating and empowering women is essential to the progress of societies.
At the same time, writing has remained central to her life. In Arabic and English, her books move between poetry, memoir, education, women’s empowerment, peace, culture, and questions of identity. In this sense, there is an intriguing continuity across generations of the Rihani family. The written word is not treated simply as literature, but as a means of participating in society.
Her latest Arabic book, من أوراقي, brings many of these dimensions together. Through reflections on cultural figures and political questions, the book looks at Lebanon through the eyes of someone who has spent a lifetime moving between cultures, institutions, literature, advocacy, and public life.
The evening at Lamartine will therefore be more than a presentation of a new book. It will be a conversation about three generations of ideas and cultural memory, beginning with Ameen Rihani’s pioneering vision of dialogue between East and West, continuing through Albert Rihani’s commitment to preserving that heritage, and reaching May Rihani, who carries that intellectual tradition forward while giving it her own voice through literature, education, women’s advocacy, and public service.
It is also a conversation about Lebanon itself, about what we inherit, what we preserve, what we challenge, and what each generation chooses to leave behind.
Event venue & nearby stays
Lamartine by Will Salha, 3409 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, United States
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