Yasmeen Hanoosh

Who is Yasmeen Hanoosh?

Yasmeen Hanoosh is an Iraqi academic and translator. She was born in Basra in 1978. She moved to the United States in 1995, subsequently obtaining a BA, MA and PhD from the University of Michigan. The title of her doctoral thesis, submitted in 2008, was "The Politics of Minority Chaldeans between Iraq and America". She is currently a professor of Arabic at Portland State University.

Hanoosh is also a translator of literary works from Arabic to English. In 2002, she won the Arkansas Arabic Translation Prize for her translation of Scattered Crumbs, a novel by the Iraqi writer Muhsin al-Ramli. In 2010, Hanoosh won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to translate Closing His Eyes, a short story collection by writer and fellow-Basraite Luay Hamza Abbas. Her translations have appeaerd in Banipal and the Iowa Review among others.