Mirene Arsanios

Mirene has been a member of the MFA Writing faculty since 2017, around the time she relocated to New York from Beirut, Lebanon. She is the author of  The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, 2015),  Notes on Mother Tongues (UDP, 2019) and The Autobiography of a Language (Futurepoem, 2022). Her writing engages questions of mother tongues, the transmission of knowledge interrupted by diasporic histories, and the intersections of class and coloniality. She is currently at work on a prose manuscript that examines the intersections between politics and poetry through the history of their relationship. Mirene teaches in the Bard MFA Writing program during the summers and has taught writing across multiple institutions in New York City (SVA, The Cooper Union, NYU, and Wesleyan University). She is currently the Program Director at the Poetry Project.

Mirene holds an MA in Contemporary Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, and an MFA in Writing from Bard College.