Dunya Mikhail

Dunya Mikhail (born 1965 in Baghdad, Iraq) is an Iraqi-American poet based in the United States.
Life.
She was born and raised in Iraq to a Chaldean-Catholic family. She graduated with a BA from the University of Baghdad.
Mikhail worked as a journalist, the literary section editor and a translator for "The Baghdad Observer". As a liberal writer during the time of dictatorship and censorship,Mikhail fled Iraq in 1995 going first to Jordan, then eventually to the United States, where she became a U.S. citizen, got married and raised a daughter. She studied Near Eastern Studies and received her MA from 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, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and was named one of the best books of 2005 by the New York Public Library, and the genre-bending work "Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea" won the Arab American Book Award. Her poetry has appeared in "Poetry International", "Modern Poetry in Translation", the "London Times", 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".
Mikhail’s honors include the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Knights Foundation grant, the Kresge Fellowship, and the United Nations Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. She is the co-founder of Michigan-community-based Mesopotamian Forum for Art and Culture. She currently works as a special lecturer of Arabic at Oakland University in Michigan.