Author Dunya Mikhail will appear at Book Beat for an in-store reading, discussion and book-signing on Sunday, April 22nd, from 4-5pm. This event is free and the public is welcome. The Beekeeper is our reading group selection for April and is discounted 15%.
“Powerful and heartbreaking, this work lets the survivors tell their stories and highlights the courage of those risking their lives to rescue others.” —reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly and selected by Publisher’s Weekly as one of top 10 non-fiction titles of 2018.
“Structurally, this book is a mix of reportage, memoir, and poetry. Mikhail keeps the reportage free from sentiment. Even the memoir sections about her own past experiences in Iraq are relayed from a somewhat cool distance. But her verses show her personal emotional landscape as she tries to wrap her head around what is happening, what might come next for each survivor, and what survival even means “when the calamity survives along with you.” –reviewed in Pop Matters
“When Mikhail pauses to reflect on her own experience, she captures the idiosyncratic grace of the world around her, showing herself an acute observer of its oddities and beauty. Birds in Michigan sing so loudly that the beekeeper, Abdullah, hears them through her phone.” –reviewed in Christian Science Monitor
About The Beekeeper:
Since 2014, Daesh (ISIS) has been brutalizing the Yazidi people of northern Iraq: sowing destruction, killing those who won’t convert to Islam, and enslaving young girls and women.
The Beekeeper, by the acclaimed poet and journalist Dunya Mikhail, tells the harrowing stories of several women who managed to escape the clutches of Daesh. Mikhail extensively interviews these women—who’ve lost their families and loved ones, who’ve been repeatedly sold, raped, psychologi- cally tortured, and forced to manufacture chemical weapons—and as their tales unfold, an unlikely hero emerges: a beekeeper, who uses his knowledge of the local terrain, along with a wide network of transporters, helpers, and former cigarette smugglers, to bring these women, one by one, through the war-torn landscapes of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, back into safety.
In the face of inhuman suffering, this powerful work of nonfiction offers a counterpoint to Daesh’s genocidal extremism: hope, as ordinary people risk their lives to save those of others.
About Dunyal Mikhail:
Poet Dunya Mikhail at the Detroit Institue of Arts photo by Cary Loren, 2015
Dunya Mikhail was born in Iraq (Baghdad) and came to the United States thirty years later. She’s renowned for her subversive, innovative, and satirical poetry. After graduation from the University of Baghdad, she worked as a journalist and translator for the Baghdad Observer. Facing censorship and interrogation Dunya Mikhail left Iraq, first to Jordan and then to America (Detroit). Her first book in English The War Works Hard(translated by Elizabeth Winslow) was shortlisted for Griffin and named one of “Twenty-Five Books to Remember from 2005” by the New York Public Library. Diary of A Wave Outside the Sea won the Arab American Book Award. Her other books include The Iraqi Nights (translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid) and 15 Iraqi Poets (editor). Her honors include the Knights Foundation grant, the Kresge Fellowship, the United Nations Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018. She is the co-founder of Michigan-community-based Mesopotamian Forum for Art and Culture. She currently works as an Arabic special lecturer at Oakland University in Michigan.
