Elmaz Abinader is an Arab-American poet, memoirist, and performer. She is a professor of English at Mills College and the co-founder of the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA). She is the author of The Children of the Roojme: A Family’s Journey from Lebanon (W. W. Norton, 1991; University of Wisconsin Press, 1997). In 2000, she received the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for her poetry collection In the Country of My Dreams… (Sufi Warrior Publishing, 1999).