Iris Jamahl Dunkle

Iris Jamahl Dunkle is an award-winning literary biographer, essayist, and poet. Her academic and creative work challenges the Western myth of progress by examining the devastating impact that agriculture and over-population have had, and continue to have, on the North American West. Taking an ecofeminist bent, her writing also challenges the American West’s male-oriented recorded history 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.

She is the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County. Her poetry collections include Interrupted Geographies (Trio House Press, 2017), Gold Passage (Trio House Press, 2013), and There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air (Word Tech, 2015). Her works have been published in Tin House, San Francisco Examiner, Fence, Los Angeles Review of Books, Split Rock Review, Taos Poetry Journal, Pleiades, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet’s Market, Women’s Studies and Chicago Quarterly Review. In 2020, her biography on Charmian Kittredge London, Jack London’s wife, was published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

*Iris featured at the Bay Area Poets Laureate Gathering & Public Reading on September 21, 2019, hosted by the San Mateo County Arts Commission and the San Mateo County Libraries.