BIO

Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi-American poet. She has published five books in Arabic and two in English. The Arabic titles include The Psalms of Absence and Almost Music. Her first book in English, The War Works Hard was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize, and was named one of the 25 best books of 2005 by the New York Public Library. It also won the PEN Translation Award (translated by Elizabeth Winslow). It was the first contemporary poetry book by an Iraqi woman published in the US. Her latest, Diary of A Wave Outside the Sea, won the Arab American Book Award. In 2001, she was awarded the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. She was born in Baghdad in 1965 and she left to the US in 1996.