Dunya Mikhail

Iraqi American poet Dunya Mikhail is the author of numerous poetry collections: The War Works Hard (New Directions, 2005), translated from the Arabic by Elizabeth Winslow, won a PEN Translation Fund Grant, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and was selected as one of the 25 Books to Remember from 2005 by the New York Public Library; Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (New Directions, 2009), which Mikhail cotranslated with Elizabeth Winslow, won the Arab American Book Award; The Iraqi Nights (New Directions, 2014), translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, won the Poetry Magazine John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation; In Her Feminine Sign (New Directions, 2019), which was chosen as one of the ten best poetry books of 2019 by The New York Public Library; and Tablets: Secrets of the Clay (New Directions, 2024). She also wrote the nonfiction book The Beekeeper (New Directions, 2018), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and her debut novel, The Bird Tattoo (Pegasus Books, 2022), which was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction.

With irony and subversive simplicity, Mikhail addresses themes of war, exile, and loss, using forms such as reportage, fable, and lyric. Though her poetry records the traumas of war and exile, she has also spoken to the effects of censorship on her work. In an interview with Cathy Linh Che for the New Directions blog, Mikhail observed, 

In Iraq, there was a department of censorship with actual employees whose job was to watch ‘public morals’ and decide what you should read and write. Every writer needed approval first before publishing. That’s why I used a lot of metaphors and layers of meanings. This was probably good for my poetry but, still, you do not want to use such figures of speech just to hide meanings. Here, in America, a word does not usually cost a poet her life. However, speech is sometimes limited to what is acceptable according to public norms. So, in Iraq, text precedes censorship. In America, censorship precedes the text.

Mikhail’s honors include the United Nations Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. A laureate of the UNESCO–Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture, she has also received fellowships from the United States Artists, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Kresge Foundation. 

Mikhail was born in Baghdad and earned a BA at the University of Baghdad. She worked as a translator and journalist for the Baghdad Observer before being placed on Saddam Hussein’s enemies list. She immigrated to the United States in the mid-1990s and earned an MA at Wayne State University. She teaches Arabic at Oakland University in Michigan.