Dunya Mikhail (born 19 March, 1965 in Baghdad, Iraq) is an Iraqi-American poet based in the United States.

[3] Mikhail worked as a journalist, as editor of the literary section, and as a translator for The Baghdad Observer.

[3] As a liberal writer during the time of dictatorship and censorship, Mikhail fled Iraq in 1995, going first to Jordan and then eventually to the United States,[4] where she became a U.S. citizen, got married, and raised a daughter.

Her works include the poetry collection The War Works Hard, which won PEN's Translation Fund award,[7] was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize,[3] and was named one of the best books of 2005 by the New York Public Library.

Her genre-bending work Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea won the Arab American Book Award in 2010.