The Rochester Hills Public Library is honored to welcome Oakland University Professor Dunya Mikhail to share her harrowing stories of several woman who managed to escape from the clutches of Daesh (ISIS), as detailed in her new critically-acclaimed book The Beekeeper, on October 11.
The Beekeeper by Oakland University Professor Dunya Mikhail
Mikhail, an award winning poet and writer and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, extensively interviewed the women featured in The Beekeeper. These women, some of whom lost their families, were sold and physically tortured, were brought one by one through the warn-torn landscapes of Iraq, Syria and Turkey, back into safety. The unlikely hero in their story is a beekeeper, who uses his knowledge of the local terrain and network of transporters to usher these women to safety.
Of her writing and her own exodus from Iraq Mikhail said in an interview, “We all feel alienated because of this continuous violence in the world. We feel alone, but we feel also together. So we resort to poetry as a possibility for survival. However, to say I survived is not so final as to say, for example, I’m alive. We wake up to find that the war survived with us.”
Be sure to come to the Rochester Hills Public Library to hear Mikhail dive into the suspenseful tales of these Iraq women hunted by ISIS and how with the beekeeper, they fled to a better life.
“We’re always so proud to welcome accomplished and talented speakers like Dunya Mikhail to the library,” said Community Relations Specialist Amanda Harrison Keighley. “The stories of the women in The Beekeeper are incredibly powerful and moving, and we’re very excited to share Mikhail’s message with our community.”
The program is October 11 from 7:00-8:30 p.m. in the Multipurpose Room and is open to everyone with an RHPL library card. This program is geared toward adults and some content may not be suitable for children. Please register in advance at rhpl.org.
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