Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Thérèse Soukar Chehade made her way to Massachusetts in August of 1983, eight years after the start of the Lebanese civil war. Writing had always been her dream. Fluent in Arabic and French, her English was serviceable, but it lacked the richness she sought. She dove into the literature of the English speaking world, finding inspiration in the works of Nabokov and Woolf. Enrolling in the MFA program at UMass, Amherst, she began working on a novel. The war, the memories she thought she left behind, crept into her stories, and she let them stay. Her first novel, Loom, set in rural Vermont, came out in 2010 from Syracuse University Press and won the Arab American Book Award for fiction the following year. Her latest work, We Walked On, published by Regal House Publishing in September 2024, is set against the backdrop of the Lebanese civil war. The novel was a 2022 Noemi Press Prose Award semifinalist and was longlisted for the 2022 Dzanc Prize for Fiction. She still lives in Massachusetts.