Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, scholar, and translator. He was born in Baghdad, Iraq and left after the 1991 Gulf War. He earned a doctorate in Arabic literature at Harvard. He has published three collections of poetry and five novels. Antoon’s translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s last prose book, In the Presence of Absence, won the 2012 American Literary Translators’ Award. His scholarly works include The Poetics of the Obscene in Pre-Modern Arabic Poetry: Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf and articles on Arabic poetry and modern Iraqi culture and politics. His essays have appeared in The Guardian, Washington Post, The Nation, The New York Times, and many pan-Arab newspapers and journals. He is co-founder and co-editor at Jadaliyya.com. Antoon is associate professor of Arabic Literature at New York University.