Reading with Dunya Mikhail and Lesyk Panasiuk

Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi American poet and writer. She is the author of the poetry collections The War Works Hard,shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize; Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, which won the Arab American Book Award; The Iraqi Nights, winner of the Poetry Magazine Translation Award; In Her Feminine Sign, which was chosen as one of the ten best poetry books of 2019 by The New York Public Library; and Tablets: Secrets of the Clay, a section of which was adopted by UNESCO as a sticker. Her nonfiction book The Beekeeper was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her debut novel, The Bird Tattoo, was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Described by The Christian Science Monitor as “one of the foremost poets of our time,” Mikhail is a laureate of the UNESCO Sharja Prize for Arab Culture and a recipient of the United Nations Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. She has also received fellowships from United States Artists, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Kresge Foundation. Mikihail’s work has been featured in PBS NewsHour, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Poetry, among others.

Lesyk Panasiuk is a Ukrainian poet, translator, artist and designer, member of PEN Ukraine, service member of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. He is the author of 7 poetry collections in Ukrainian. His works have been translated into dozens of languages. His book Letters of the Alphabet Go to War was published in early 2026 by Sarabande Books, both in the original and in English translation by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris. Panasiuk is the co-author of a type of short poetic form Poetry Bug that employ a 3-line pattern (2–2–2). He is a translator and co-translator of 6 poetry collections, 3 literary anthologies, and 1 libretto, including Ukrainian translations of poetry collections by Valzhyna Mort and Ilya Kaminsky. Panasiuk is a laureate of numerous literary and art contests, a recipient of fellowships from the President of Ukraine, International Writers’ and Translators’ House, House of Europe, Staromiejski House of Culture, Shevchenko Scientific Society, Dartmouth College, Literary Colloquium Berlin, PEN Ukraine, Translatorium, University of Alberta.