Dunya Mikhail was born in Baghdad in 1965 and lived there until the authorities considered her poetry to be not as innocent as it looked. When the threat towards her became pronounced, Dunya Mikhail left for the United States. By then she had published two collections of poetry that also included poems about the wars she had experienced: the Iraq–Iran war of 1980–88 and the first Gulf War of 1992, which lasted 43 days.