STERLING HEIGHTS, MI, August 04, 2020 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Dunya Mikhail has been inducted into Marquis Who's Who. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Praised for her lyrical, figurative style examining the themes of war, censorship, memory, trauma and longing, Ms. Mikhail has garnered a laudable reputation as an award-winning Iraqi-American poet and educator. Writing in Arabic and English, her passion for poetry stemmed from the tragedy of losing her father at a young age. It is customary for poetry to be read at Iraqi funerals, and Ms. Mikhail found herself so affected by the words spoken at his memorial that she was inspired to pursue her own journey in self-reflection through writing. In an NPR interview, Mikhail was asked if she saw her poetry as part of a healing process. She replied that she didn't think poetry heals, but instead "keeps the wound open forever." She says, "poetry is not medicine- it's an X-ray. It helps you see the wound and understand it." Dunya Mikhail wrote her first poem when she was in a ship on the Tigris. "I gave the poem to my cousin and he made it into a paper boat. He tossed it into the river and we watched the boat-poem drift away down the river," she says. About that experience, she later says in a poem (published in her book "In Her Feminine Sign", published by New Directions (NY): My paper boat that drifted into the river with the world behind it had a special note. It may arrive one day although late, all truths come late.
Ms. Mikhail completed a Bachelor of Arts in English literature at the University of Baghdad in 1987 and worked as a journalist and translator for the Baghdad Observer from 1989 until 1995. After being placed on a political blacklist facing censorship and dictatorship, she immigrated to the United States, where she be-came an adjunct instructor of Arabic at Wayne State University. In 2001, Ms. Mikhail earned a Master of Arts in Near Eastern Studies from Wayne State. She served as an Arabic resource teacher for Dearborn Public Schools from 2002 to 2009, and taught Arabic at Michigan State University during the 2011 to 2012 academic year.
Since 2012, Ms. Mikhail has served as a special lecturer at Oakland University, during which she has earned the 2013 Kresge Artist Fellowship and was named as a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. Moreover, she has written several collections of poetry in Arabic and English, and her first volume of English language poetry, "The War Works Hard," published in 2005, was the winner of a 2004 PEN Translation Award (translated by Elizabeth Winslow) and shortlisted for the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize. Ms. Mikhail's 2009 memoir in verse, "Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea," was the winner of the 2010 Arab American Book Award. She continues to write and edit, including a 2013 Iraqi poetry anthology, "The Iraqi Nights," released in 2014, and "The Beekeeper," her first nonfiction work, published in 2018, a finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, and long-listed for the National Book Award.
Well-regarded for her contributions to the field, Ms. Mikhail was notably the recipient of a United Nations Human Rights Award for Freedom in Writing, and helped establish of the Mesopotamian Forum for Art and Culture. Her most recent work, "In Her Feminine Sign," released in 2019, was listed as one of the New York Public Library's Best Poetry Books of 2019 and was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Selection. Ms. Mikhail is a member of the Academy of American Poets, the Middle East Study Association, and PEN for American Writers.
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