UT alum to read passage from new book

November 9, 2012 | Events, UToday, — Languages, Literature and Social Sciences, Honors
By Brian Purdue



Two men, living in Toledo during the 1970s, work to import hashish under the cover of the family mortuary business. They soon must learn to face personal and familial struggles that come with the territory.

Geha

This is the story told in Lebanese Blonde, the recently released novel by Joseph Geha, a University of Toledo alumnus.

Geha will read from his book that follows immigrant cousins Aboodeh and Samir Tammouz and the significant challenges that arise for both them and others around them as they manage their smuggling efforts to import a highly potent variety of hashish called “Lebanese blonde.”

Sponsored by UT’s Department of English Language and Literature and the Honors College, the free, public reading will take place Tuesday, Nov. 13, at 5 p.m. in Memorial Field House Room 2100.

Geha was born in Lebanon in 1944 and arrived in the United States with his parents, sister and brother in 1946. He graduated from St. Francis de Sales High School in 1962 and The University of Toledo, where he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 1966 1968, respectively.

His first book, a collection titled Through and Through: Toledo Stories, was published in 1990 by Graywolf Press.

Many of Geha’s poems, plays, short stories and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies.

He has been granted a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His fiction has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and has been chosen for inclusion in the permanent Arab-American archive of the Smithsonian Institution.

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