Iris Jamahl Dunkle is an award-winning literary biographer, essayist, and poet. Her academic and creative work challenges the Western myth of progress by examining the devastating impact that agriculture and over-population have had, and continue to have, on the North American West. Taking an ecofeminist bent, her writing also challenges the American West’s male-oriented recorded history by researching the lives of women. She obtained her MFA in poetry from New York University and her PhD in American Literature from Case Western Reserve University.

Dunkle was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Her newest poetry collection West : Fire : Archive was published by Mountain/ West Poetry Series in March 2021.  Her other poetry collections include Interrupted Geographies (Trio House Press, 2017) Gold PassageLinks to an external site. (Trio House Press, 2013) and There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air (Word Tech, 2015).  Her poem “Listening to the Caryatids on the Palace of Fine Arts” was featured on 100 buses as part of the San Francisco Beautiful and Poetry Society of America Muni Art 2020 campaign. Her works have been published in Tin House, San Francisco Examiner, Fence, Los Angeles Review of Books, Split Rock Review, Taos Poetry Journal, Pleiades, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet’s Market, Women’s Studies, and Chicago Quarterly Review.

Her biography Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer was published by the Oklahoma Press (2020 print edition 2023 audiobook edition). Her biography Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb will be published by the University of California Press, in fall 2024.