Shadab Zeest Hashmi, a Pakistani-American poet and essayist, is the winner of the San Diego Book Award, Sable’s Hybrid Book Prize, the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize, and has been nominated for the Pushcart multiple times. Zeest Hashmi’s work engages with history, cultures of encounter, aesthetics and the life of the spirit. She has presented in literary festivals, museums, academic institutes, and conferences across the US and abroad. Her books include two poetry collections Kohl and Chalk and Baker of Tarifa, a volume of prose and poetry titled Ghazal Cosmopolitan which has been praised by Marilyn Hacker as “a marvelous interweaving of poetry, scholarship, literary criticism and memoir.” Her latest book is Comb, a hybrid memoir about growing up in Peshawar, the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, during the Soviet war. Comb is a rumination on borders, and the larger historical, literary and cultural encounters across the ancient Silk Road, of which Peshawar was a significant outpost. Zeest Hashmi’s poetry has been translated into Spanish, Turkish, Bosnian and Urdu, and has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals worldwide, most recently in McSweeney’s In the Shape of a Human Body I am Visiting the Earth 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.

Short Bio: 

Shadab Zeest Hashmi’ poetry and essays have been published worldwide. She is the winner of the San Diego Book Award, Sable’s Hybrid Book Prize, and the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize. Her books include Baker of Tarifa, Kohl and Chalk, Ghazal Cosmopolitan and the lyric memoir Comb. Zeest Hashmi’s poems have been translated into Spanish, Bosnian, Urdu and Turkish, and her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Mudlark, The Cortland Review, POEM, World Literature Today, Verse Daily, Thrush, Wasafiri, McSweeney’s In the Shape of a Human Body I am Visiting the Earth and The Best Asian Poetry 2021 among other publications.