Dunya Mikhail

Dunya Mikhail (born 1965 in Baghdad, Iraq) is an ethnic Chaldean United States-based poet who was born in Iraq.^[1] Mikhail worked as Literary Editor for The Baghdad Observer. Facing increasing threats and harassment from the Iraqi authorities for her writings, she fled Iraq in the late 1990s and studied Near Eastern Studies at Wayne State University. In 2001, she was awarded the United Nations Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing.

Mikhail speaks and writes in Arabic and English. Her works include the poetry collection The War Works Hard, which won PEN's Translation Fund award^[2] and was named one of the best books of 2005 by the New York Public Library, and the genre-bending work The Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals as well as anthologies including World Beat: International Poetry Now from New Directions, Flowers of Flame: Unheard Voices of Iraq, and Iraqi Poetry Today: Modern Poetry in Translation. She currently lives in Michigan where she works as an Arabic instructor for Michigan State University.

Bibliography

• The Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, 1999
• The War Works Hard, (translated in 2005 by Elizabeth Winslow) (shortlisted for the 2006 International Griffin Poetry Prize)
• The Psalms of Absence

References

1. ^ Dunya Mikhail: 'The War Works Hard' : NPR
2. ^ "Dunya Mikhail: The War Works Hard" at the PEN American Center website; accessed 8 Mar 2011.

External links

• Official Web site
• Griffin Poetry Prize biography
• Griffin Poetry Prize reading, including video clip
• Boston Review - Poetry Microreview of The War Works Hard
• Dunya Mikhail profile on Words Without Borders Web site
• Dunya Mikhail interview and reading on National Public Radio (NPR)
• Dunya Mikhail's poem in Hindi translation

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Name	Mikhail, Dunya
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Date of birth	1965
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