Dunya Mikhail

Acclaimed Iraqi-American Poet & Writer
Arab American Book Award-winner

Readings &
Lecture Topics
  • In Her Feminine Sign
  • The Making of The Beekeeper
  • An Evening with Dunya Mikhail

Biography

“Mikhail’s style maintains an impressive fragility and delicacy of image that touches the reader’s heart.” —American Poetry Review 

“Stark and poignant, Mikhail’s poems give voice to an often buried, glossed-over or spun grief.” —Publishers Weekly

“Shakespeare would have enjoyed the poetry of Dunya Mikhail, who has spoken of love as a response to a war-torn world—an aesthetic, a value, and a practice. ” —Christian Science Monitor

Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi American poet and writer. After graduating from the University of Baghdad, she worked as a journalist and translator for The Baghdad Observer. Facing censorship and interrogation, she left Iraq in 1995, first to Jordan and then to America, settling in Detroit. She earned a Master’s degree from Wayne State University and she currently teaches Arabic  and poetry at Oakland University in Michigan.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, Dunya Mikhail is “one of the foremost poets of our time.” She is a laureate of the UNESCO Sharja Prize for Arab Culture and has received fellowships from the United States Artists, the Guggenheim, and Kresge. Her honors also include Arab American Book Award, and UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. Her writing has garnered attention from The PBS News Hour, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Poetry, among others.

Her books include The War Works Hard (2005) (translated by Elizabeth Winslow), shortlisted for the International Griffon Poetry Prize; Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (2009), winner of the Arab American Book Award. The Iraqi Nights (2014) received the Poetry Magazine Translation Award (translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid), and In Her Feminine Sign (2019), which was selected as the Wild Card Choice (UK) and chosen by The New York Public Library as one of the ten best poetry books of 2019. Most recently, her collection Tablets: Secrets of the Clay (2024), translates the the world’s first symbols into the matter of our contemporary, everyday life.

Her non-fiction The Beekeeper (co-translated with Max Weiss), was a finalist for the National Book Award and shortlisted for PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award. The Bird Tattoo (2022), her debut novel, 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. In an NPR interview, Mikhail said, “I feel that poetry is not medicine- it’s an X-ray. It helps you see the wound and understand it. We all feel alienated because of this continuous violence in the world. We feel alone, but we feel also together. So we resort to poetry as a possibility for survival. However, to say I survived is not so final. We wake up to find that the war survived with us.”

Mikhail’s honors include the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing (2001), Kresge Artist Fellowship (2013), a United States Artist Writing Fellowship (2021), and a UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture (2022). She writes in Arabic and English and selections of her work are translated into Italian, Chinese, Spanish, Kurshi, Hindi, among other languages. She is the co-founder of Mesopotamian Forum for Art and Culture in Michigan.

Mikhail lives in Michigan and works as an Arabic lecturer for Oakland University.

Short Bio

Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi American poet and writer. She is a laureate of the UNESCO Sharja Prize for Arab Culture and has received fellowships from the United States Artists, the Guggenheim, and Kresge. Her honors also include Arab American Book Award, and UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. Her books include Tablets: Secrets of the Clay; The War Works Hard (translated by Elizabeth Winslow), shortlisted for the International Griffon Poetry Prize; Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, won the Arab American Book Award. The Iraqi Nights received the Poetry Magazine Translation Award (translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid), and In Her Feminine Sign, selected as the Wild Card Choice (UK), was 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 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.

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