Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus (1944–2007) remains one of the Arab world's best-known and influential contemporary poets. Born into an Iraqi Assyrian family and growing up in Al-Habbaniyah, Kirkuk, and Baghdad, he started publishing his own work in 1961, in the ground-breaking Shi'r [Poetry] magazine in Beirut. After settling in San Francisco in the late 1960s, he began translating most of the major English-language modern poets, and many others, into Arabic, and dedicated his life to reading, writing, and translating poetry. He died in Berlin in October 2007.