Mikhal Dekel was born in Haifa, Israel, to a Holocaust refugee father and and an Israeli born mother. After completing two years of mandatory army service and a bachelors of law at Tel Aviv University's Buchmann Faculty of Law, she travelled to New York, abandoned the law, and eventually earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. She now lives with her teenage son in Manhattan, where she is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the City College and the CUNY Graduate Center and Director of CCNY’s Rifkind Center for Humanities and the Arts. She is the recipient of many awards - including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation and the Lady Davis Foundation – and is the author of three books and many articles. Her latest book, TEHRAN CHILDREN, is a cross between history and memoir of her Polish-born father, a former child refugee in Central Asia and Iran. To read some of Mikhal's works and find out about events and readings go to mikhaldekel.com.
