Tarfia Faizullah

Tarfia Faizullah is a Bangladeshi American poet. Born in 1980 in Brooklyn, New York, she was raised in West Texas. In 2010 she traveled to Bangladesh to interview survivors of rape by Pakistani soldiers during the 1971 Liberation War, who were officially known as the birangona. Seam (SIU, 2014), her first book, was a collection of poems inspired by the many interviews she had with the birangona; it won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Awards Her writing has also appeared widely in media across the US and abroad and in many journalistic media such as BuzzFeed. In 2016, Harvard Law School included Faizullah in their list of 50 Women Inspiring Change

Life Tarfia Faizullah is a Bengali American poet. Born in 1980 in Brooklyn, New York City; she was raised in Midland, 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. 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. Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Awards