Noor is recognized as an “exceptional talent who can produce singular work that opens our eyes to the wide range of human experience.”

Noor Al-Samarrai is a deeply committed poet, journalist, and educator earning her MFA in creative writing at UM-Ann Arbor. 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, 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.

Now as an MFA student at U-M, Noor is recognized as an “exceptional talent who can produce singular work that opens our eyes to the wide range of human experience.” She is currently working on her second book, a project drawing upon the Iraqi oral histories. She has also prioritized publicly-engaged scholarship, most recently garnering grant support to work in partnership with the Arab American National Museum’s Community History team.

CEW+ is proud to name Noor an Elsie Choy Lee Scholar.