Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, filmmaker and translator. He studied English literature at Baghdad University before coming to the United States after the 1991 Gulf War. He did his graduate studies at Georgetown and at Harvard where he is a PhD candidate in Arabic literature. His poems and articles (in Arabic and English) have appeared in The Nation, an-Nahar, as-Safir, Masharef, al-Adab, Middle East Report, al-Ahram Weekly and Banipal. He has published a collection of poems entitled Mawshur Muballal bil-Huroob (A Prism; Wet with Wars, Mirit Books, Cairo) and a novel I`jam (Diacritics) (Dar al-Adab, Beirut), and a selection of his work appears in the anthology Iraqi Poetry Today.

Antoon returned to Iraq in 2003 as a member of InCounter Productions to film a documentary about the lives of Iraqis in a post-Saddam occupied Iraq. He is a senior editor with the Arab Studies Journal, a member of Pen America and a contributing editor to Banipal. His translations of modern Arabic poetry have appeared in two anthologies of Mahmud Darwish's poetry (The Adam of Two Edens) and (Unfortunately It Was Paradise) published by Syracuse and Berkeley and in various journals including Banipal and The Nation. A recipient of a Mellon Doctoral Dissertation Grant (2002), Antoon currently teaches Arabic and Arabic literature at Dartmouth College and is finishing his dissertation, "The Poetics of the Obscene," on the 4th/10th century poet Ibn al-Hajjaj.