Nazik al-Mala¿ika was born in Baghdad in 1923. After graduating from the Iraqi Teachers' Training college in 1944, she received a Rockefeller Scholarship to study at Princeton University from 1950-51 and went on to earn a Master's degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1954. In addition to publishing seven poetry collections, four full-length works of literary criticism, and dozens of articles in the most widely read Arabic literary periodicals of the time, she also taught literature at the Teacher's Training College in Baghdad, at Basra University, and at the University of Kuwait. She died in Cairo in 2007.