OU’s Dunya Mikhail selected to serve as Holmes Visiting Professor of Poetry at Princeton this fall

Dunya Mikhail, special lecturer of Arabic in Oakland University’s Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and of creative writing in the Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film, will spend the Fall 2026 semester teaching at Princeton University as the Holmes Visiting Professor of Poetry.

The professorship is an honorary position that invites a distinguished contemporary poet to come to Princeton for one semester to teach a class, give a talk and/or poetry reading and mentor students on their poetry portfolios.

“It is a significant professional honor and meaningfully supports my ongoing creative work,” Mikhail said, “which I believe also reflects positively on our department and Oakland University.”

Born in Iraq, Mikhail has devoted much of her career to championing human rights. She immigrated to the United States in the mid-1990s, after her writings were deemed subversive by the authoritarian regime in power at the time, and was later honored with the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing.

Mikhail’s award-winning poetry collections include “The War Works Hard” (winner of PEN’s Translation Fund Award), Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (winner of the Arab American Book Award), “The Iraqi Nights” (winner of the Poetry Magazine Translation Award) and “In Her Feminine Sign" (chosen as one of the 10 best poetry books of 2019 by The New York Public Library).

She has also published two critically acclaimed books, “The Beekeeper” and “The Bird Tattoo,” chronicling the plight of Yazidi women in northern Iraq. Her writing has garnered attention from PBS News Hour, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Poetry, among others.

Looking ahead to her time at Princeton, Mikhail expressed enthusiasm about engaging with students and faculty in an intensive creative environment. “I look forward to sharing my work, learning from the Princeton community, and entering into conversations about poetry across languages and cultures,” she said. “For me, teaching and writing are deeply connected acts — both are ways of listening, witnessing and building bridges.”