Nazik al-Malaʾika was born in Baghdad in 1923. After graduating from the Iraqi Teachers’ Training college in 1944, she received a Rockefeller Scholarship to study at Princeton University from 1950-51 and went on to earn a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1954. In addition to publishing seven poetry collections, four full-length works of literary criticism, and dozens of articles in the most widely read Arabic literary periodicals of the time, she also taught literature at the Teacher’s Training College in Baghdad, at Basra University, and at the University of Kuwait. She died in Cairo in 2007.
Emily Drumsta is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. She has published articles in Research in African Literatures, Social Text and Middle Eastern Literatures, and has a chapter in the forthcoming volume The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Translation. Her translations from Arabic have appeared in McSweeney’s, Asymptote, Jadaliyya, and ArabLit. She was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Grant for Revolt Against the Sun.
