Choman Hardi is an educator, poet, and scholar whose work is informed by an intersectional approach to inequality. She is renowned for her pioneering work on issues of gender and education. Choman returned home after twenty-six years of displacement, to teach English and initiate gender studies at the American University of Iraq- Sulaimani (AUIS). She founded the Center for Gender and Development Studies (CGDS) there. Under her leadership, CGDS initiated the first interdisciplinary gender studies minor in Iraq, and is developing gender studies resources in Kurdish and Arabic, funded by the European Union. She is a Co-Director of the GCRF Gender, Justice and Security Hub, on which she is researching about the role of institutions and practices on the construction of masculinity.

She is the author of critically acclaimed books in the fields of poetry, academia, and translation. In 2011, her Leverhulme Trust funded post-doctoral research, Gendered Experiences of Genocide (Routledge) was named a UK Core Title by the Yankee Book Peddler. Since 2010, poems from her first English collection, Life for Us (Bloodaxe, 2004) are studied by secondary school students as part of their English curriculum in the UK. Her second collection, Considering the Women (Bloodaxe, 2015), was given a Recommendation by the Poetry Book Society and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her translation of Sherko Bekas' Butterfly Valley (ARC, 2018) won a PEN Translates Award .