Sinan Antoon

Sinan Antoon’s teaching and research interests lie in pre-modern Arabic literature and contemporary Arab culture and politics. His scholarly works include The Poetics of the Obscene: Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013) and numerous essays on the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, Sargon Boulus and on contemporary Iraqi culture. His essays and creative writings in Arabic have appeared in major journals and publications in the Arab world and in New York Times, Aljazeera.net, The Nation, Middle East Report, Journal of Palestine Studies, Journal of Arabic Literature, The Massachusetts Review, World Literature Today, Ploughshares, and Washington Square Journal. He has published two collections of poetry in Arabic and one collection in English: The Baghdad Blues (Harbor Mountain Press, 2007). He has published three novels: I`jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody (City Lights, 2007) which has appeared in German, Portuguese, Norwegian and Italian editions, The Pomegranate Alone (2010) forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2013, and Ya Maryam (Beirut: Dar al-Jamal, 2012). His translations from the Arabic include Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence (Archipelago, 2011) and a selection of Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef’s late work, Nostalgia; My Enemy (Graywolf, 2012). His translation of Toni Morrison’s Home is forthcoming in Arabic in 2013. Antoon returned to his native Baghdad in 2003 as a member of InCounter Productions to co-direct a documentary, About Baghdad, about the lives of Iraqis in a post-Saddam-occupied Iraq. In 2009, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the EUME Program at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a member of the Editorial Review Board of the Arab Studies Journal and co-founder and co-editor of the cultural page of Jadaliyya. In spring 2013, he will be a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin .