ABOUT RAMI OBEID

As a Middle Eastern child who came to Toronto, Canada at the age of two, Rami Obeid, like many other children of immigrants, experienced two cultures growing up. At home, Arabic food and music filled the air while his mother watched a soap opera about villagers from the 1930s while lecturing him on the dangers of the girlfriend. Outside the cramped apartment, he skipped school to go over to friend’s houses to smoke cigarettes and listen to metal music. 

Sometimes on these “extracurricular field trips”, he would go to the local library, where the written word made its intervention into his life as he read whatever he could get his hands on; Danielle Steel, Stephen King, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Munsch, among many others. Rather than having a particular taste, the library threw up all over him, and he never bothered to clean himself up. When he saw the impact that literature had on him, he knew that he didn’t just want to be a reader; there was a place for him in writing

Rami’s work has been published across multiple online and print publications. His chapbook “Marooned on the Shores of Malaise” was published in 2020 by Whispering Wick Chapbook Press. You can follow him on twitter @obeid_ro.