AMY MERRILL is a Boston (MA USA)-area playwright, producer, co-founder, organizer and featured artist with the Her Story Is collective. Her plays range from the impact of war on veterans and their families to an (often humorous) examination of the lives and struggles of 19th century women: Jane Addams, Isabella Bird and Alice Hamilton. A proud member of the Her Story Is collective, Amy is committed to making connections with individuals and groups that will foster peaceful dialogue as well as creative collaborations, notwithstanding the separation of geography and war. For more about Amy, go to amymerrillplays.com

Jennifer Jean’s poetry collections include Where do you live? أين‭ ‬تعيشين؟, VOZ, Object Lesson, and The Fool. Her resource book is Object Lesson: a Guide to Writing Poetry and she’s the editor of the forthcoming anthology Other Paths for Shahrazad: a Bilingual Anthology of Poetry by Arab Women. She’s received honors from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Mass Cultural Council, and the Women’s Federation for World Peace. Jennifer is an organizer for the Her Story Is collective, a faculty member at Solstice MFA, and a senior program manager at the Fine Arts Work Center. For more info, visit: http://www.jenniferjeanwriter.com

Dr. Hanaa Ahmad Jabr has a PhD of Philosophy in Arabic Literature. Her poetry collections include: My Sorrow’s Reward from His Collar, and Zahr (Flowers). Her books of criticism include: The Dialectic of Poetry and Prose in Modernist Poetry, and The Poetics of the Prose Poem. She released a children's book: Sultan and Shanidar; as well as co-wrote and co-translated Where Do You Live? أين تعيش؟ (with Jennifer Jean). Hanaa teaches at the University of Mosul.

Wadaq Qais received a degree in accounting in 2021 and is completing her degree in Translation Studies at the University of Basra. She’s co-translated the collaborative and bilingual collection Where Do You Live? أين تعيش؟ (Arrowsmith Press) with Iraqi poet Hanaa Ahmad Jabr and American poet Jennifer Jean.

Anne Loyer is a cofounder of Her Story Is. She is a Co-artistic Director of Fort Point Theatre Channel, where she has been instrumental in bringing the work of Iraqi artists to local audiences by helping to produce plays, gallery shows, readings and panel discussions. In addition to this work, she focuses on collaborations that open up new paradigms for understanding climate through projects like Ocean of Rivers.

Elham Nasser Al-Zabedy is a poet, visual artist, and women’s rights advocate. Born in Baghdad, she graduated from the Institute of Fine Arts, Music Department, in Basra. Al-Zabedy is a leading figure in cultural activism, founding and running the Lotus Cultural Women’s League. She serves as a member of the international project Her Story Is. She wrote the foreword, and curated poetry for Other Paths for Shahrazad: a Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Arab Women (Tupelo Press 2026). Her literary contributions encompass the poetry collections Whispers of the Walnut Tree (2008) and Shores of the Sparrows (2012).

Abeer Abdulkareem is a translator, researcher, foreign language instructor and linguist. Prior to joining Her Story Is, Abeer worked as a Senior Language Researcher at Language Research Center in Maryland, where she wrote several books on Arabic language and its dialects. Prior to this role, she taught Arabic language at Dartmouth College. She holds a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. A recipient of Fulbright Scholarship. She fluently speaks Arabic language, Iraqi, Levantine, and Egyptian Arabic.