Name: Noor Al-Samarrai

Recipient Type: Scholarship Recipient

Recipient Year: 2024

School Name: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Major: MFA in Creative Writing

Description: Noor Al-Samarrai is the author of El Cerrito (Inside the Castle, 2018), winner of a 2019 Arab American Book Awards honorable mention and named “about the best piece of literature I have read in a long time” by late poet and filmmaker Jonas Mekas. She writes about the confluence of place and memory, the tender intersection of the personal and political. A 2022 Periplus Collective Fellow, Noor’s work has been supported by Mophradat, the Fulbright Foundation, Breadloaf Environmental Writer’s Conference, and the Islamic Scholarship Fund. Born and raised in California to accidental-immigrants from Iraq, these days she resides in Detroit, where she’s pursuing her MFA at the University of Michigan where she won first place in the Hopwood Graduate Poetry Award and is working on a poetry collection documenting the emotional cartography of mid-20th century Baghdad titled Baghdad:Dwellings.

Sponsor: Afshin Riaz Future Leaders Scholarship