Mikhail speaks and writes in Arabic and English. Her works include the poetry collection The War Works Hard, which won PEN's Translation Fund award,[7] was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize,[2] and was named one of the best books of 2005 by the New York Public Library, and the genre-bending work Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea won the Arab American Book Award. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry International, Modern Poetry in Translation, the London Times,[8] as well as anthologies including World Beat: International Poetry Now from New Directions, Flowers of Flame: Unheard Voices of Iraq, and Iraqi Poetry Today: Modern Poetry in Translation.