Tarfia Faizullah

Tarfia Faizullah is a Bengali American poet. Born in 1980 in Brooklyn, New York City; she was raised in Midland,[4] Texas. She earned an MFA from the Virginia Commonwealth University program in creative writing. In 2006, after attending a poetry panel at the University of Texas at Austin which featured the Bengali author Mahmud Rahman. He had translated an excerpt of a novel, Talaash, by a writer named Shaheen Akhtar, which described the life of a woman who had been raped by Pakistani soldiers during the 1971 Liberation War. This historical event inspired her to begin researching the women affected by it. After applying and receiving a Fulbright scholarship, she traveled to Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2010 to interview survivors of these atrocities, whom the Bengali government has dubbed birangona. Seam (SIU, 2014), her first book, was a collection of poems that were inspired by the many interviews she had with the birangona.[5] Her second book, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf Press, 2018), was in development for 15 years and discusses many personal themes; it interrogates questions of memory, faith and locations beyond Bangladesh.[3] Until 2019 she served at the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers’ Program as the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor in Poetry.[6]

• Seam, Southern Illinois University Press, 2014, ISBN 9780809333257
• Registers of Illuminated Villages: Poems, Gray Wolf Press, 2018, ISBN 9781555978006

In Anthology

• Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, University of Georgia Press, 2018, ISBN 9780820353159
• Halal If You Hear Me Haymarket, 2019, ISBN 9781608466047

• Associated Writers Program Intro Journals Award[7]
• Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize[8]
• Copper Nickel Poetry Contest (2012)[9]
• Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Margaret Bridgman Scholarship in Poetry[10]
• Sewanee Writers’ Conference scholarship[11]
• Fulbright fellowship[12]
• Three Pushcart Prizes[13]
• 'Ploughshares’ Cohen Award.[14]
• Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Awards[15]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Tarfia Faizullah.

• Sean Carman (February 10, 2014). "Everything Is Near and Unforgotten: An Interview with Tarfia Faizullah". The Paris Review.
• "Tarfia Faizullah". Poetry Foundation. 21 March 2022.