Born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon during the civil war, Ashraf Osman came to the United States in 1998 to pursue his graduate studies in architecture at Syracuse University. His thesis, titled “Memory for Forgetfulness”: Registering/Effacing the Memory of the Lebanese War received the James Britton Memorial Award for Outstanding Thesis, and is featured on 111101 - Memory and Creation [Artworks, Writings and References in Lebanon]. His interest in memory and forgetting carries over from architecture to poetry, a medium he finds in many ways to be more apt for the subject matter.

Ashraf has been living in Philadelphia since 2002 where he works as an architect and keeps a poetry blog, called arch.memory. He has been slowly emerging on the Philadelphia poetry scene: he won second prize at an Open Poetry Competition in May of last year, his blog has been featured on the Blinq, the blog of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and he was selected recently as one of 100 Blogging Poets on the web. Currently at work on his first poetry collection, Ashraf is beginning to partake in readings and journal submissions.