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:

Mojdeh Bahar has translated and edited Song of the Ground Jay: Poems by Iranian Women, 1960-2022. Additionally, she's translated In the Mirror: Poems and Collages byTaraneh Habib; Silence and Lost Words, a selection of Rouhangiz Karachi’s poetry; and The Dusk of Exile: Poems of Longing and Light, a selection of Jila Mossaed’s poetry. Her translations have also appeared in Lyrikline and Stepaway, Loch Raven Review, and Women, Life, Freedom, an anthology by Guernica Editions. Mojdeh has served as a senior executive in the public sector and currently serves as an executive in a non-profit. In her career she has worked at the cross section of technology, innovation, business, law and policy.

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 the author of seven poetry collections published by Carnegie Mellon University Press including Bad Harvest and Those Absences Now Closest. She's a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Grant, a New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a co-recipient of a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship. Her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s selected poems, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Derek Walcott Prize in Poetry, ALTA’s National Translation Award in Poetry, and the 2020-2021 winner of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize. Their co-translations from the Ukrainian of Halyna Kruk’s poetry Lost in Living was awarded a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship and was named a 2025 PEN America Literary Award for Translation finalist. Dzvinia is a contributing poetry editor to AGNI and Solstice Literary Magazine. She is Writer-in-Residence at the Solstice Low-Residency MFA program.