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Sarah Ghazal Ali
Poet, Scholar, and Editor of Palette Poetry
Sarah Ghazal Ali is the author of THEOPHANIES, selected as the Editors' Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award, and forthcoming with Alice James Books in January 2024.
A 2022 Djanikian Scholar, her poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, Pleiades, the Rumpus, and elsewhere.
Sarah is the editor of Palette Poetry and lives in Lewisburg, PA where she is a Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University.
About Their Work:
"“A woman crowned holy is a calamity worth repeating”: Sarah Ghazal Ali’s poetry makes sense of what that could mean. Her poems prismatically evoke a fraught, compelling vision poised at the nexus of Islam, empire, internet and the female body. In this poet’s work, Qur’an, Ecclesiastes, NSA and Tom Ford all show up, all stare at her, but the speaker stares back, talks back to, about and at them. The voice that emerges from this contest is sometimes wry, sometimes impassioned, sometimes quietly defiant. If the language of the poems doesn’t at all seem in-the-garden-variety holy, it certainly comes across as wholly true, brisk and compelling. It’s something I believe in more than any scripture, and is something I am looking forward to hearing."
– Dave Karp
Follow On:
IG: @caesarah
Twitter: @caesarah_
Website(s):
Books (for purchase):
THEOPHANIES (Alice James Books, forthcoming January 2024)
Online Work:
"My Faith Gets Grime under Its Nails" | Poetry
"Still Life with Empire" | Poetry Northwest
"O Gabriel" | The Rumpus
"Mother of Nations" | Pleiades [Print]
"Litany with Hair" | The Bennington Review [Print]
"February Augury" and "Parable of Flies" | The Adroit Journal
"Daughter Triptych" | Quarterly West
nominated for Best New Poets 2022"Elegy..." and "Photo Op..." | Electric Literature
"Nazar" | EX / POST
"First Encounter with Jinni" | Poet Lore
"Litany of al-Bayt" | Mizna [Print]
"Annunciation" and "Nude" | The Boiler
"Annunciation" nominated for Pushcart 2021
"Navel to Knee" | Narrative Magazine
"On Seeing" | Slant'd [Print]
"Theophanies" | Chestnut Review
"Last Night, Noor Jahan Visited" | DEAR Poetry Journal
"Shirk" and "The Reward of Goodness..." | Faultline Journal [Print]
"Tumulus" and "Mundane History..." | Verse of April
"Matrilineage [Recovered]" | The Seventh Wave
"Spectacle" | Frontier Poetry
"Aurat," "Partition Ghazal," and "Self Portrait..." | Memorious Journal
"Self Portrait..." nominated for Best New Poets 2021
"Ghazal Ghazal" and "Ghazal on the Day of" | Palette Poetry
"Motherhood 1999" | Wildness
"Interview..." and "Story of the Cranes" | Tinderbox Poetry Journal
"Story of the Cranes" nominated for Best of the Net 2020
"Dua for [ ]" and "The Guest" | Waxwing Literary Journal
"There are Versions to Everything" | Up the Staircase Quarterly
Read for Margin Shift:
March 11, 2023