Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, translator and scholar, born and raised in Baghdad. After the 1991 Gulf War, he left to the United States where he obtained a doctorate in Arabic Literature in 2006 at Harvard. He has published two collections of poetry in Arabic: Mawshur Muballal bil-Hurub (Cairo, 2003) and Laylun Wahidun fi Kull al-Mudun (Dar al-Jamal, 2010). His first novel, I`jaam (2003) was translated into English as I`jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody (City Lights, 2006) as well as Norwegian, German, Portuguese and Italian. His second novel is Wahdaha Shajarat al-Rumman (Dar al-Jamal, 2013). Translated by the author and published as The Corpse Washer (Yale University Press, 2013), it won the Best Arab American Book Award and the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Literary Translation in 2014. His third novel, Ya Maryam (Ave Maria), (Dar al-Jamal, 2012) was published in Spanish as Fragmentos de Bagdad (Turner Libros 2014). His translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s last prose book In the Presence of Absence (Archipelago Books, 2011) won the 2012 National Translation Award. His academic works include articles on the history and politics of Iraq. His book The Poetics of the Obscene: Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) is the first study of the 10th century poet Ibn al-Hajjaj. Sinan Antoon is an Associate Professor at New York University's Gallatin School and co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya.