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Award-winning poet Dunya Mikhail (b. 1965) was born in Iraq, where she worked as a journalist for the Baghdad Observer. Facing increasing threats from the Iraqi authorities, she fled first to Jordan, then to the United States in 1996. Her books include The Iraqi Nights, Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, and The War Works Hard, which was named one of the New York Public Library’s “Twenty-Five Books to Remember from 2005.” She currently works as an Arabic special lecturer at Oakland University in Michigan.