Sheema Kalbasi

Sheema Kalbasi is an Iranian-Danish-American multigenre writer, and humanitarian. A Pushcart Prize winner and recipient of a United Nations humanitarian award, she was named one of the top ten influential American poets of the 21st century.Her poems, translations, and essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Atlanta Review, The Berlin Literary Review, Split Rock Review, Triggerfish Critical Review, and Asymptote, among others, and have been featured by PEN America and Black Lawrence Press. Her essay “How Iran’s 'Woman, Life, Freedom’ Protests Live On Today,” published by Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages, set to music, adapted into short films, and performed internationally at the Smithsonian National Museum, the Canadian Parliament, the Tribute World Trade Center, and the United Nations World Food Programme.Her books include Jahan Malek Khatun: The Princess Poet of Fourteenth-Century Persia (Daraja Press, 2026); the chapbook The War Took Our Names (Seven Kitchens Press, 2026), selected for the Allison Joseph Series; Spoon and Shrapnel (Daraja Press, 2024); and Echoes in Exile (PRA Publishing, 2006), featured on Stony Brook University’s Women and Gender Studies reading list. She is also the editor and translator of The Poetry of Iranian Women (Reel Content, 2009) and Seven Valleys of Love: A Bilingual Anthology of Women Poets from Medieval Persia to Present-Day Iran (PRA Publishing, 2008).She is a grantee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands and a nominee for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Her work explores war, exile, displacement, gender apartheid, and the resilience of silenced voices.
She has lived in the Middle East, South Asia, and Europe, and now makes her home in the United States.