سێ شیعر

Venus Faiq (1963), from Iraqi Kurdistan’s city of Sulaimani, is a poet and activist bringing awareness to issues of genocide. She has worked in TV, radio, and as a print journalist for more than twenty-five years. She earned her B.A. in philosophy at the University of Baghdad (1989). She has published eleven books, including two books of poetry in the Sorani dialect of Kurdish: Beautiful Sins (2001) and The Last Samurai (2013). In addition to Kurdish, she writes fluently in Arabic and German. She has lived in the Netherlands since 1996. Some of her works have been translated into French, Spanish, and Italian, and the present work is the first attempt to bring her poetry into English. Venus has received many local and international awards. She is an active member of the international poets’ movement, an international syndicate for journalism, and an organization for immigrant journalists in the Netherlands.

Sarwar Taha is a native of Sulaimani, Iraq. He currently attends the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS). In addition to his classes, Taha works as a textbook reviewer for AUIS’s Center for Gender and Development Studies (CGDS). He is helping the CGDS develop the first multilingual, gender-balanced curricula for primary, secondary, and undergraduate courses in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq. At the outset of 2020, Taha will be working for Kashkul, Center for Arts and Culture at AUIS, as a project coordinator for the city of Sulaimani’s application to be designated a UNESCO Creative City of Literature. In 2017, Taha’s essay, “The Enlightenment,” received first prize in a university-wide competition. He speaks Kurdish, Arabic, Turkish, and English.

Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse is a translator, poet, and professor who has lived and worked in Iraq since 2011. Levinson-LaBrosse completed a Ph.D. in Kurdish Studies on nineteenth-century poetry from the University of Exeter. Handful of Salt (The Word Works, 2016) and Dictionary of Midnight (Phoneme Media, 2019) introduced the poetry of Kajal Ahmad and Abdulla Pashew, respectively, to English. Her writing has appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Words Without Borders, The Sewanee Review, The Iowa Review, and World Literature Today. She currently serves as the director of Kashkul, the center for arts and culture, at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani.