Iris Jamahl Dunkle

Iris Jamahl Dunkle (she/her) is a poet, literary biographer, and essayist. She writes that her academic and creative work “challenges the Western myth of progress by examining the devastating impact that agriculture and overpopulation have had and continue to have on the North American West.” 

Dunkle is the author of West : Fire : Archive (Center for Literary Publishing, 2021); Interrupted Geographies (Trio House Press, 2017), a finalist for the Colorado Prize for Poetry and selected as The Rumpus’s July 2017 Poetry Book of the Month; There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air (WordTech Communications, 2015), a finalist for the 2015 Snyder Prize; and Gold Passage (Trio House Press, 2013), winner of the 2012 Trio Award.

Dunkle was the 2017–2018 poet laureate of Sonoma County, California. She earned an MFA in poetry from New York University and a PhD in American literature from Case Western Reserve University.