Author: Dunya Mikhail

Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi American poet and writer. She is a laureate of the UNESCO Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture and has received fellowships from the United States Artists, the Guggenheim, and Kresge. Her honors include the Arab American Book Award and a UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. Her books include The War Works Hard (translated by Elizabeth Winslow), shortlisted for the International Griffon Poetry Prize; Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, which won the Arab American Book Award; The Iraqi Nights (translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid), winner of a Poetry Magazine Translation Award; and In Her Feminine Sign, selected as A Poetry Book Society Autumn 2019 Wild Card Selection (UK), and chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the ten best poetry books of 2019. Her non-fiction The Beekeeper (co-translated with Max Weiss), was a finalist for the National Book Award and was shortlisted for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award. The Bird Tattoo, her debut novel, was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. She currently works as a special lecturer of Arabic and poetry at Oakland University in Michigan.