Yasmeen Hanoosh is an Iraqi academic and translator.[1] She was born in Basra in 1978. She moved to the United States in 1995, subsequently obtaining a BA, MA and PhD (in Middle Eastern Studies) from the University of Michigan. The title of her doctoral thesis, submitted in 2008, was "The Politics of Minority Chaldeans between Iraq and America".[2] She is currently a professor of Arabic at Portland State University.
Hanoosh is also a translator of literary works from Arabic to English. In 2002, she won the Arkansas Arabic Translation Prize for her translation of Scattered Crumbs, a novel by the Iraqi writer Muhsin al-Ramli. In 2010, Hanoosh won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to translate Closing His Eyes, a short story collection by writer and fellow-Basraite Luay Hamza Abbas.[3] Her translations have appeaerd in Banipal and the Iowa Review among others.