Yasmeen Hanoosh is a literary translator, fiction writer, and professor at the department of World Languages and Literatures at Portland State University, where she teaches Arabic language and literature and directs the Arabic program. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan in 2008. Yasmeen studies the cultural politics and literary expressions in post-2003 Iraq, especially what concerns the country’s ethno-religious minorities. She is the author of the monograph The Chaldeans: Politics and Identity in Iraq and the American Diaspora (Bloomsbury, 2019) and co-author of the edited volume, Beyond Refuge in Arab Detroit (Wayne State University Press, forthcoming, 2025). Her current research project focuses on the education system in modern Iraq and on Arabic fiction and the encounter with oil.
As a fiction writer, Yasmeen has published a short story collection, Ardh al-Khayrat al-Mal‘una (The Land of Cursed Riches, Al-Ahliyya Press, 2021—Longlisted for al-Multaqa Literary Prize, 2022). Her second Arabic collection, Atfal al-Janna al-Mankuba (Children of Afflicted Paradise) is forthcoming from Kotob Khan, Cairo. It has also been translated and excerpted in several languages, including English, Spanish, and Italian.
Yasmeen is an award-winning literary translator. Her translation Closing His Eyes (Abbas), received an NEA translation fellowship in 2010, and her translation of Scattered Crumbs (al-Ramli) won the Arkansas Arabic Translation Prize in 2002, and has been since excerpted in a number of publications and anthologized in Literature from the Axis of Evil: Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Other Enemy Nations (2006). Yasmeen’s other English translations of Arabic fiction have appeared in various literary journals and publications, including World Literature Today, Banipal, ArabLit Quarterly, Michigan Studies Quarterly, Jadaliyya, Words Without Borders, The Iowa Review, among others.