Shadab Zeest Hashmi is a Pakistani-American poet and essayist whose works have been published worldwide. She is the winner of numerous awards and distinctions, including the San Diego Book Award, Sable’s Hybrid Book Prize, the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize, and multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson Program for Writers, and a BA in English (Creative Writing) from Reed College. Her books include two poetry collections Kohl and Chalk and Baker of Tarifa, a volume of essays and poetry titled Ghazal Cosmopolitan which has been praised by Marilyn Hacker as “a marvelous interweaving of poetry, scholarship, literary criticism and memoir.” Comb, her latest book, is a lyric memoir selected by Julia Bouwsma (the Poet Laureate of the state of Maine) as the Best Hybrid Book 2019. Zeest Hashmi’s poetry has been translated into Spanish, Turkish, Bosnian and Urdu, and has appeared in numerous international anthologies and journals, most recently in McSweeney’s In the Shape of a Human Body I am Visiting the Earth, Hybrid Tapestries, New Moons and The Best Asian Poetry 2021.

She has taught in the MFA program at San Diego State University as a writer-in-residence and her work has been included in the Language Arts curriculum for grades 7-12 (Asian American and Pacific Islander Women Poets) as well as college courses in Creative Writing and the Humanities.