Ink Knows No Borders

by Patrice Vecchione

  Tarfia Faizullah is the author of the poetry collections Seam and Registers of Illuminated Villages. She has been honored with three Pushcart Prizes. In 2016, Faizullah was recognized by Harvard Law School as one of “50 Women Inspiring Change.” Her poem “Acolyte” captures her own childhood experience. In an interview with Grist Journal, she said, “I grew up in West Texas in a Bangladeshi Muslim household in which Bangla was the primary language spoken. In the evenings, we prayed Maghrib and ate rice and lentils with our (right) hands, and in the mornings, I would wake up and go to the Episcopalian private school and attend the daily chapel service . . . Each time I went to Bangladesh, it was impossible to convey to my cousins what it was like to be an acolyte. Language has always been a way for me to try to articulate the strange and familiar wonder of both returning to Bangladesh and returning to Texas: those places that are both and neither my homelands. I think there’s such richness in the space between those worlds, even though some days I want to disavow them.” Faizullah is the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan. (tfaizullah.com)

  Poet, editor, and nonfiction writer Hafizah Geter was born in Nigeria and immigrated to the US with her family when she was a toddler. The daughter of a Nigerian mother from a Muslim family and an American father raised Southern Baptist in Alabama, her dual cultural heritage inspires much of her writing. In an interview with the New York Times, she said, “Often, people think that for an immigrant, the whole thing is just this big gift that you’re receiving. Of course when you’re leaving a place for a better life it’s a gift, but it becomes such a big cost to the person that’s leaving.” Geter believes that the power of poetry is that it “cannot be controlled, and it’s especially dangerous because it’s a tool used in minority and disenfranchised communities. The very act of speaking up in a world that tries to silence you—especially when you’re coming from a marginalized identity—can actually have life or death consequences.” Geter is a Cave Canem Fellow and an editor at Amazon Publishing’s Little A and Day One. She is at work on a poetry collection and a nonfiction book exploring the intersection of gender, nationality, race, and the human condition. (hafizahgeter.com)

  Carlos Andrés Gómez is a “proud Colombiano poet from New York City.” About poetry, he says, “Oftentimes the greatest writing is putting down on paper what you know you shouldn’t write.” In addition to defying any “should” on paper and with his performances at slams, this spoken-word poet has raised over $40,000 to fight HIV/AIDS. Gómez graduated with an MFA from Warren Wilson College. The author of the memoir Man Up: Reimagining Modern Manhood, he’s the winner of the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, including for “Pronounced,” a poem that, as he wrote on the Crab Orchard Review blog, was “inspired by my childhood: growing up feeling pulled between languages, identities, and worlds.” Gómez has performed on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and had a leading role in Spike Lee’s blockbuster film Inside Man. (carloslive.com)

  Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, a graduate of Stanford University, is a poet, the author of several books, and an academic. She is the first editor of the pathbreaking Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia. In 2017 Gutiérrez y Muhs received the Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Arts and Sciences from Seattle University, where she is a professor. Her collections of poetry include A Most Improbable Life and The Runaway Poems: A Manual of Love. She wrote her poem “Las Casas Across Nations” in response to the ongoing US–Mexican border crisis, saying, “the border has always been a porous region,” across which her family traveled back and forth for more than one hundred years. (seattleu.edu/artsci/about/faculty-and-staff/gabriella-gutierrez-y-muhs-phd.html)

  Born in the Philippines, Janine Joseph immigrated to the US with her family when she was eight. It wasn’t until she received her federal Student Aid Report during her senior year of high school that she learned she wasn’t a citizen, which meant she had to turn down college acceptances and scholarships. Joseph is an active member of Undocupoets, a group that promotes the work of undocumented poets. About writing her debut collection of poems, Driving Without a License, which won the 2014 Kundiman Prize, she said, in an interview with the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, “It was impossible for me to tell a straightforward, linear immigration narrative wherein I easily immigrated, overcame adversity, assimilated, and then achieved the American Dream. Poetry allowed me to approach my story a fragment at a time. More, though it had been a fairly private and personal art and undertaking when I was younger, poetry became a voice and vocation that required no one’s permission or authorization but mine.” She is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at Oklahoma State University. In addition to being a poet, Joseph is a librettist, and her work has been commissioned for the Houston Grand Opera. (janinejoseph.com)

  Mohja Kahf was born in Syria and came to the US when she was three. A writer from childhood, she was first published when she was ten and won a poetry contest in high school. She has authored two books of poetry, E-mails from Scheherazad and Hagar Poems; a novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf; and many works of nonfiction, including Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque. In an interview for Medium, she said she is inspired by the “rich heritage of Arab foremothers in poetry, even if, yes, they’re always pulling against how they get marginalized and condescended to.” As a member of the Syrian Nonviolence movement, Kahf works to help Syrians in crisis and to educate Americans about the country of her birth. She told Medium: “I think that activism for human rights, including gender rights, has this built-in impetus that it wants to reach people. It means seeing people’s language and people’s stories as sources for your telling, as muses among your muses.” She’s a professor at the University of Arkansas. (@ProfKahf)

  Ilya Kaminsky, who lost most of his hearing when he was four, was born in the former Soviet Union city of Odessa and came to the US as a teenager when his family was granted asylum. He began writing poems in English when his father died a year after their arrival. “I understood right away that it would be impossible for me to write about his death in the Russian language,” he explained in an interview with the Adirondack Review. “I chose English because no one in my family or friends knew it—no one I spoke to could read what I wrote. I myself did not know the language. It was a parallel reality, an insanely beautiful freedom.” His poetry collections Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic demonstrate his love of languages and the ways that they transform us. Once a law clerk for San Francisco Legal Aid and the National Immigration Law Center, Kaminsky currently works as a court-appointed special advocate for orphaned children and teaches English and comparative literature at San Diego State University. (ilyakaminsky.com)

  Li-Young Lee was born in Indonesia to Chinese political exiles who had fled China’s turmoil. Persecution followed the family to Indonesia, as well, where his father was charged with crimes against the state and imprisoned. While his family was being taken to a prison colony, they escaped, and were eventually able to obtain asylum in the US. His memoir, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, centers around the upheaval of his early life. Lee’s many poetry collections have received numerous awards and honors, including recognition from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Through writing poetry as a university student, Lee found a way to make the English language his own. In an interview with Image, he said, “The whole enterprise of writing absolutely seems to me like a spiritual practice . . . When you practice an art form, you realize that the poem is a descendent of your psyche, but your psyche, if you pay attention, is a descendent of something else, let’s say the cosmos.”

  Joseph O. Legaspi was born in the Philippines and his family immigrated to California when he was twelve. The author of the poetry collections Imago, Threshold, and several chapbooks, he received a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and co-founded
Kundiman, a nonprofit organization dedicated to nurturing writers and readers of Asian American literature. In an interview with the Creative Independent, Legaspi said, “My pursuing something creative leads to this amazing brotherhood and sisterhood and siblinghood with creative folks. That’s the best thing about being a creative, because I would say 90% of your friends are creative. They, in turn, bring so much beauty and language and sunlight, and darkness, and drama in your life. You feel alive all the time, having all these people around you. I’m really thankful for it.” (josepholegaspi.wordpress.com)

  Ada Limón is the author of five books of poetry, including, most recently, The Carrying, as well as Bright Dead Things, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award in Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of the Year by the New York Times in 2015. Describing her poetry as mostly autobiographical, she told an interviewer from Compose: “I want my poetry to help people recommit to the world we are living in, to the ugly mess and beautiful strangeness of it. I don’t provide any answers in my poems, but I hope to ask the right questions and reveal the right truths that make people feel like they aren’t alone. I’ve said before that the most important words, for me, in poems are the words that aren’t written, the words that say, ‘me too.’” Limón makes her home in Lexington, Kentucky, and is on the faculty of the Queens University of Charlotte low-residency MFA program and the 24Pearl Street online program for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. (adalimon.com)

  The author of the poetry collection Sisters’ Entrance, Emtithal Mahmoud was born in Sudan and came to the US in 1998 as a child refugee. She won the 2015 Individual World Poetry Slam Championship with her poem “Mama.” In an interview with PRI’s The World, she said, “It’s mostly about my mother on the surface, but the reality is that the things I learned from her she learned from her mother, and her mother before her . . . [I]t’s about the women in my family, the women in my life.” Since high school, she has been an activist dedicated to bringing attention to the violence in Darfur. “The interesting thing about war is that people seem to think there’s a particular start and end to the war, but in reality, it’s much messier than that. When Darfur was no longer on the front page of the New York Times every day, when people stopped talking about it in the big media outlets, people thought, ‘Oh, the war must have stopped.’ But the reality is, we’re still living it every day,” she told PRI’s The World. Appointed a Goodwill Ambassador in 2018 for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, she has traveled extensively to witness its work and has represented the organization at many high-profile events, including the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society. (@EmiThePoet)

  Mia Ayumi Malhotra is a poet from the San Francisco Bay Area. The child of missionary parents, she moved with her family in 1990 to the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, a country then coming out of Cold War isolation, a place without paved roads or traffic lights. It was there Malhotra began to write. In an essay for Inheritance, she recalled, “I wrote stories about the world around me, and when I didn’t know the word for something, penciled in an empty speech bubble to indicate the presence of something that couldn’t be articulated.” Her debut poetry collection, Isako Isako, winner of the 2017 Alice James Award, follows four generations of female Japanese Americans, including an internment camp survivor, to explore how mass displacement and rampant racism in America’s past relate to current events. A Pushcart nominee, she’s received fellowships from the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop and Kundiman. (miamalhotra.com)

  Rajiv Mohabir is a Guyanese American poet and translator of Indo-Caribbean origin. His parents emigrated from Guyana to London to Canada to New York City and then moved to Florida. During a difficult adolescence, Mohabir found solace in writing. He’s the author of the poetry collections The Taxidermist’s Cut, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and The Cowherd’s Son, winner of the Kundiman Prize. He describes his project Coolitude: Poetics of the Indian Labor Diaspora as “the cultural productions of writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers who descend from indentured laborers [‘coolies’] from Guyana, Trinidad, Suriname, Mauritius, South Africa, Fiji, and those in second diaspora in England, the United States, and Canada.” In an essay for Jacket2, he wrote: “I am haunted by transoceanic crossings, the suppression of my familial religions and languages, and being thingified—albeit to a lesser extent than Black folks. This rich and colorful history shows up in my poetry as I write.” Mohabir received his PhD in English from the University of Hawai‘i and is currently an assistant professor of poetry at Auburn University. (rajivmohabir.com)

  Born in Haiti and raised in the Boston suburbs, Lenelle Moïse is a poet, playwright, and performance artist who creates jazz-infused, hip-hop bred, politicized texts about the intersection of identity, memory, and spirit. In an interview with Time Out New York, Moïse said this about her performance work: “I’m really interested in breaking down the fourth wall of theater. And one of the ways is just by saying, ‘I can hear you, I can see you. We’re all in this together,’ and trying to create a casual ceremony with the audience.” Her performances include: Where There Are Voices, a response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti based on her poetry collection Haiti Glass; Speaking Intersections, a queer feminist blend of poetry and prose; Word Life, an autobiographical coming-of-age story; and K-I-S-S-I-N-G, about teens bonding across their socioeconomic differences. In an interview with the Smith College alumnae magazine, she said, “I see poetry everywhere: in movement, in dialogue, in Haiti, in paintings, in the public-housing tenements of my memories, in embraces. My credo is that a poem is only effective on stage when my writing is pulsing with life.” (lenellemoise.com)

  A daughter of Dominican immigrants, Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet, translator, and educator who was born and raised in New York City. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry and Poetry in Translation and was a 2014 CantoMundo Fellow. Her poetry collection, The Pink Box, was longlisted for a PEN award. In an interview for the Letras Latinas blog, she reflected on her poem “The Day I Realized We Were Black”: “It was one of the most painful poems to write and took me nearly two years to be able to read it aloud without crying. And that is poetry, when the truth in the poem turns you so delicate that you break, then you know you’re risking everything on the page.” (yeseniamontilla.com)

  Gala Mukomolova is a Russian American poet, essayist, and artist living in New York City, who, under the name Galactic Rabbit, writes horoscopes and love notes for NYLON. A recipient of the 2016 “Discovery”/Boston Review poetry contest prize, she is the author of the poetry collections One Above/One Below: Positions & Lamentations and Without Protection. In her essay “Golubki, Golubchik,” published in The Crazy Wisdom Community Journal, she wrote: “Between worlds, I had too much language and not enough, and because of this I was a child who rarely spoke from a place of want. To express want was a sign of weakness, and I trained myself around it.” (galacticrabbit.com)

  Born to a Filipina mother and a father from South India, Aimee Nezhukumatathil spoke of her childhood in an interview for Divedapper: “Growing up as one of the only Asian-Americans in most of my school always set me a little apart, always observing. But my parents fostered a sense of being grateful and amazed and wanting to always be curious about the world and its inhabitants so I never truly felt alone.” That curiosity led her to write poetry that is often inspired by her love of nature and science. She’s the author of four poetry collections, most recently Oceanic, as well as World of Wonder, a book of illustrated nature essays. The Tupelo Press Prize, the Global Filipino Award, a Pushcart, and a National Endowment are among her distinctions. She teaches creative writing and environmental literature at the University of Mississippi and is the poetry editor of Orion magazine. In her Divedapper interview, she also said, “I’m not sorry for writing about wonder and joy.” (aimeenez.net)

  Hieu Minh Nguyen identifies himself as “a queer Vietnamese American poet and performer based out of
Minneapolis.” He’s the author of the poetry collections This Way to the Sugar, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and Note Here. He has received a 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the NEA and Kundiman. He is also a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine and an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. In an interview for Poets & Writers, he said, “For a long time, I didn’t know how to write about my traumas. I found myself writing the same poems over and over again, even if they didn’t make any sense to the world . . . I guess the hope was that if I could write the poems, if I could speak about my trauma in a way that didn’t seem careless, I could stop trying to explain myself.” (hieuminhnguyen.com)

  The son of Mexican immigrants, José Olivarez is co-host of the podcast The Poetry Gods and the author of the poetry collection Citizen Illegal. He is a marketing manager for Young Chicago Authors (YCA), where he began writing poetry as a teen—an experience that helped prepare him for his admission to Harvard University. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, he talked about overcoming the feelings of “weakness” he felt because of his native language and culture. “As I began writing, I realized I could be a part of a loving community. It didn’t have to be me against the world; it was a community trying to build a new world for everyone we love.” About his poem “ode to the first white girl i ever loved,” Olivarez says, “I wrote [it] in a workshop while thinking about romantic love as a political choice. If I only see white women as beautiful, and I do not come from a white woman, then how do I see myself?” (joseolivarez.com)

  Ladan Osman is a Somali-born American poet and educator whose work is centered on her Somali and Muslim heritage. She is the author of the poetry collections Ordinary Heaven, a chapbook which was included in Seven New Generation African Poets, a project of the African Poetry Book Fund, The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony, which won the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, and Exiles of Eden. A teacher by profession, she is also a contributing editor at the Offing. She grew up in a Columbus, Ohio, neighborhood that was largely populated by other East Africans, and she told the Paris Review that while she’s “rooted to America,” her “cellular memory calls to places I haven’t seen in my adult life. Sometimes negotiating that feels like a challenge. In my poems, too—trying to figure out who the work is for, what the work is for, what it is meant to do.” She added: “So many different elements go into my work, but there’s a very direct link to the way my parents would tell stories—their comfort using parables, making leaps in language, speaking in metaphor.” (@OsmanLadan)