Iris Jamahl Dunkle

Iris Jamahl Dunkle is an award-winning literary biographer, essayist, and poet. Her academic and creative work challenges Western myth of progress by examining the devastating impact of agriculture and over-population in the North American West. She also challenges the American West’s male-oriented recorded history in her writing by researching the lives of women. She obtained her MFA in poetry from New York University and her PhD in American Literature from Case Western Reserve University. Dunkle was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Her newest poetry collection West : Fire : Archive was published by Mountain West Poetry in March 2021. Her other poetry collections include Interrupted Geographies, Gold Passage, and There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air. Her poem “Listening to the Caryatids on the Palace of Fine Arts” was featured on 100 buses as part of the San Francisco Beautiful and Poetry Society of America Muni Art 2020 campaign. Her works have been published in Tin House, San Francisco Examiner, and more. Her biography Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer was published by the Oklahoma Press, and her biography Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb will be published by the University of California Press, in September 2024.