Ra’ad Abdulqadir, born in 1953, was an Iraqi poet and journalist. He earned a PhD in Islamic philosophy and was a pioneer of the Iraqi prose poem. He began publishing his work in the 1970s, and during his lifetime published around 15 books of poetry. He was a lifelong editor of the literary magazine, Aqlam, considered one of the best in the Arab world. Living under a dictatorship and surviving the Iraq-Iran War, the Gulf War, and sanctions, Ra’ad, as writer and translator Mona Kareem put it “processes collective despair with a tone of subtle sarcasm­—a quality unusual of Iraqi poetry.” Ra’ad died in 2003.