Southern Asia

Coming from a background in literature and classical Indian dance, transdisciplinary artist Ashwini Bhat (she/her) uses sculptures, installations, video, and text to develop a unique visual language that explores...

Shlagha Borah (she/her) was born in Assam, India. She earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is an editorial assistant at The Offing. Her work has been published in The Cincinnati...

Chandanie Somwaru (she/her) is an Indo-Caribbean woman born and raised in Queens, New York. She is the author of Urgent \\ Where the Mind Goes \\ Scattered (Ghostbird Press, 2021). Her writing has been published...

Samyak Shertok (he/him) is the author of No Rhododendron (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), selected for the 2024 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. His poems have been published in The Cincinnati Review...

Abhijit Sarmah (he/him) is a poet from the northeastern Indian state of Assam and a researcher of global Indigenous writing. Sarmah earned a master of philosophy degree from Dibrugarh University, India, and...

Faisal Mohyuddin is the author of Elsewhere: An Elegy (Next Page Press, 2024), The Displaced Children of Displaced Children (Eyewear Publishing, 2018), and the chapbook The Riddle of Longing (Backbone, 2017...

On his 70th birthday, in an address delivered at the university he founded in 1918, Rabindranath Tagore said: “I have, it is true, engaged myself in a series of activities. But the innermost me is not to be...

Poet Shadab Zeest Hashmi grew up in Peshawar, Pakistan. She moved to the United States to attend Reed College, where she earned her BA, writing a poetry thesis that considered postcolonial Pakistani identity...

Moniza Alvi was born in Pakistan and grew up in England. Her most recent collection, At the Time of Partition (Bloodaxe Books, 2013), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Haji Khavari has a degree in architecture and sings in a punk band. He lives in Shiraz, Iran.

Poet, essayist, and translator Indran Amirthanayagam was born in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He was raised in Sri Lanka, London, and Honolulu. Amirthanayagam has authored numerous poetry collections, ...

Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi was born Jalal al-Din Mohammad-e Balkhi on the edge of the Persian Empire, in Balkh in modern-day Afghanistan (though another birthplace in Tajikistan is also claimed). The son...

Harris Khalique was born in Karachi, Pakistan to artistic parents: Khalique’s father was a filmmaker and his mother a writer and teacher. Khalique attended schools in Karachi and earned his MA from the London...

Mir Mahfuz Ali was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh. His first collection, Midnight, Dhaka, was published in 2014 by Seren. He lives in London.

Divya Victor is the author of CURB (Nightboat Books, 2021), winner of the 2022 PEN Open Book Award and the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition, CURB was a finalist for the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award...

R. Parthasarathy has translated the old Tamil epic, The Tale of an Anklet: An Epic of South India (Columbia University Press, 1993). He teaches Indian literature at Skidmore College.

Poet, writer, and dancer Tishani Doshi was born in Madras, India, to Welsh and Gujarati parents. She earned a BA from Queens College in North Carolina and an MA from the Writing Seminars from the Johns Hopkins...

Poet, short story writer, and obstetrician/gynecologist Mo H. Saidi was born in Ahwaz, Iran. He earned an MD at the University of Tehran Medical School and immigrated to the United States in 1969. Saidi earned...

Vivek Narayanan was born in India and raised in Zambia. He earned an MA in cultural anthropology from Stanford University, and an MFA in creative writing from Boston University. Narayanan's books of poems...

Poet, translator, folklorist, and philologist A.K. Ramanujan was born in Mysore, India. He earned degrees at the University of Mysore and Deccan College in Pune and a PhD from Indiana University. Ramanujan...