About the Instructor/Moderator

HER STORY IS, a collective led by independent women writers and artists from the United States and Iraq, promotes projects aimed at expanding linguistic, artistic, and cultural boundaries in response to global conflict and its aftermath, with a focus on centralizing the experience of women.

The event host and participants are:

Nidia Hernandez was born in Venezuela and has lived in the United States since 2018. She is a poet, translator of Portuguese poetry, editor, broadcaster, and radio producer. Her editorial project, LaMajaDesnuda.com, won the 2011 World Summit Awards, and her radio program, also called La Maja Desnuda, has presented works of the last 35 years with more than 1,820 broadcasts. Currently, she is broadcasting the program through UPV Radio 102.5 FM Spain. Hernández curates Poesiaudio (Arrowsmith Press, Boston); is a co-editor for Mercurius Magazine, a British publication based in Barcelona; and belongs to the board of directors of the New England Poetry Club. She is the winner of the 2021 Sundara Ramaswamy Prize for her editorial work on The Land of Mild Light: Selected Poems by Rafael Cadenas. In 2022, she published a new anthology, The Invisible Borders of Time: Five Female Latin American Poets, which won the 2023 Mass Poetry Community Award.

Amy Merrill is playwright, librettist, anti-war activist, and advocate for women artists. Her plays include: Winter Colors, Ardent Girls, A Cold Day in Summer, The Pulse Project, and Shoe Leather Epidemiology; as well as Camp Seagulls (co-written with Elham Nasser Al-Zabedy). Her libretti in-development are The Isabella Project and Her Rocky Mountain. She’s an organizer for the Fort Point Theater Channel and a founding member of Her Story Is—a collective of independent women artists in Iraq and the United States which promotes projects in response to global conflict and its aftermath.

Dunya Mikhail is the author of Tablets: Secrets of the Clay; The War Works Hard (translated by Elizabeth Winslow), shortlisted for the International Griffon Poetry Prize; Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, won the Arab American Book Award. The Iraqi Nights received the Poetry Magazine Translation Award (translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid), and In Her Feminine Sign, selected as the Wild Card Choice (UK), was chosen by The New York Public Library as one of the ten best poetry books of 2019. Her non-fiction book The Beekeeper (co-translated with Max Weiss), was a finalist for the National Book Award and was shortlisted for PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award. The Bird Tattoo, her debut novel, was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. She is a laureate of the UNESCO Sharja Prize for Arab Culture and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, and Kresge. Her honors also include an Arab American Book Award, and a UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. She currently works as a special lecturer of Arabic and poetry at Oakland University in Michigan.

Dzvinia Orlowsky is author of seven poetry collections published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, including Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” selection, and Those Absences Now Closest, named to Brilliant Books’ Most Brilliant Books of 2024 list. Her honors include two Pushcart Prizes, the 2026 David Ferry and Ellen LaForge Prize in Poetry and Poetic Translation, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Grant, and the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award. She received a 2019 New England Poetry Club Samuel Washington Allen Prize for her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna.” Her co-translations with Ali Kinsella of Ukrainian poetry include Natalka Bilotserkivets’s Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize and winner of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize; Halyna Kruk’s Lost in Living, a 2024 NEA Translation Fellowship recipient and PEN America Literary Award finalist; and Oleksander Dovzhenko’s The Enchanted Desna (Lost Horse Press, 2026). Orlowsky is a founding editor of Four Way Books, a contributing poetry editor for Solstice Literary Magazine, and Writer-in-Residence at the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program.

Bänoo Zan is a poet, translator, and curator, with numerous published pieces and books including Songs of Exile and Letters to My Father. Bänoo is a war correspondent in verse. She is the founder of Shab-e She’r (Poetry Night), Canada’s most diverse and brave poetry open mic series (inception 2012). It bridges the gap between poets from different ethnicities,  nationalities, religions (or lack thereof), ages, genders, sexual orientations, abilities, poetic styles, voices, and visions. Bänoo, with Cy Strom, is the co-editor of the international poetry anthology Woman Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution. She was given Life  membership in the League of Canadian Poets in 2024 and is the recipient of the 2025 Writers’ Union of Canada Freedom to Read Award.