Poetry From the September 2004 issue: Old News

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Dunya MikhailDunya Mikhail

Born in Iraq in 1965, Dunya Mikhail is famous for her subversive, innovative, and satirical poetry. She has published four collections of poetry in Arabic, including The Psalms of Absence, Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, and Almost Music, and has had poems in many anthologies, including Le Poeme Arabe Moderne, Iraqi Poetry Today, The Post-Gibran Anthology of New Arab-American Writing, New Arab Poetry, and The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology. She has also appeared in magazines such as Poetry International and Modern Poetry in Translation and recently had a poem published in the London Times as part of an article about the "art of war." In 2001, she was awarded the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. Recently, her work "The War Works Hard" won PEN's Translation Award. She has a master's degree in Near Eastern studies from Wayne State University and a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Baghdad. She is currently working as a director of the Iraqi American Center, a community-based nonprofit humanitarian organization, and as a teacher of Arabic.

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Translated from ArabicArabic by Elizabeth Ann WinslowElizabeth Ann Winslow

Elizabeth Ann Winslow is a fiction writer and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her translation of Dunya Mikhail's The War Works Hard won the PEN prize for translation and will be published by New Directions Publishing. Other poems from this collection have been published in Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry International, and Circumference.

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