Dunya Mikhail

Dunya Mikhail
Reading at a Split This Rock event, 2014
Born	1965 Baghdad, Iraq
Language	Assyrian; Arabic; English
Nationality	Iraqi
Alma mater	Wayne State University
Genre	Poetry
Notable awards	United Nations Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing

Dunya Mikhail (born 1965 in Baghdad, Iraq) is an Iraqi poet based in the United States.

She was born and raised in Iraq. She graduated with a BA from the University of Baghdad.

Mikhail worked as Literary Editor, journalist, and translator for The Baghdad Observer. After having been questioned by Saddam Hussein's government and facing increasing threats and harassment from the Iraqi authorities for her writings, Mikhail fled Iraq in 1996 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, Assyrian 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 The Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea. 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.

She currently lives in Michigan where she works as an Arabic instructor for Michigan State University.