Volume 14: Noor Al-Samarrai

1. Du’a #10 Contrapuntal With My Mother’s Wisdom 2. Journey to Iraq 1 (I try to visit in my dreams and am stopped on the tarmac) 3. Dream Market  4. Dream Market 5. چمة 6. American Dream Market 7. Dream Market (silly sonnet for l) 8. رشاد  9. طین Noor Al-Samarrai is a deeply committed poet, journalist, and educator who earned her MFA in creative writing at UM-Ann Arbor, where she was recognized as an “exceptional talent who can produce singular work that opens our eyes to the wide range of human experience.” As an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, she studied with C.S. Giscombe, Robert Hass, and Lyn Hejinian. Noor developed an enduring love of teaching during this time, directing poetry workshops for the campus spoken word community, and further cultivated her journalistic practice. Her undergraduate thesis in political economy focused on the relationship between architecture and identity in mid-twentieth-century Baghdad. This work illuminated a lack of complex, human stories in the literature describing Baghdad and set Noor on the path to fashioning her own archive of Iraqi oral histories about pre-war Baghdad. Following her graduation from UC Berkeley, Noor pursued the life of an itinerant writer and independent scholar, first in Turkey where she volunteered as an Arabic translator for NGOs serving refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Somalia, freelanced as a journalist, and met many members of her extended family — themselves refugees from Iraq — for the first time. Then, with the support of a Fulbright fellowship, Noor moved to Amman, Jordan and dedicated herself to gathering oral histories for a documentary poetry collection about the emotional cartography of pre-war Baghdad. Noor has also worked as a journalist for Atlas Obscura, toured in 11-piece punk band Sloppy Jane, worked as a podcast producer, and written a book of fieldwork-derived poetry, “EL CERRITO,” published with Inside the Castle Press in 2018 and recipient of an honorable mention from the 2019 Arab American Book Awards. As a post-graduate Zell Fellow in poetry, she has continued work on her second book, continuing her oral history work in partnership with the Arab American National Museum’s Community History team and Allied Media Projects. Noor is partially deaf and blind, and her favorite sense is touch.  Artist Statement:  At its best, poetry offers us a form of meaning-making, amulets to carry, worry, and return to when the world becomes unrecognizable. These poems emerge from my own meaning-making practices: dreams, travels with friends, conversations with my mother and other elders, the formalized practices of oral history and historiography … In my lifetime, I haven’t yet managed to see Baghdad as a result of ongoing troubles (war, sanctions, occupation, etc). This saddens me. These are some glimpses from my practice of looking lovingly and carrying this place with me, from afar.