Sheema Kalbasi

Sheema Kalbasi is an Iranian Danish American writer and humanitarian. She is a Pushcart Prize–winning poet, a recipient of a United Nations humanitarian award, and a grantee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands.Her books include Echoes in Exile (PRA Publishing, USA, 2006), listed in Stony Brook University’s Women’s and Gender Studies curriculum; Seven Valleys of Love (PRA Publishing, USA, 2008); The Poetry of Iranian Women (Reel Content, USA, 2008); Spoon and Shrapnel (Daraja Press, Canada, 2024); The War Took Our Names, selected for the Allison Joseph Series (Seven Kitchens Press, USA, 2026); and Jahan Malek Khatun: The Princess Poet of Fourteenth-Century Persia (Daraja Press, Canada, 2026).Her writing has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Black Lawrence Press, and Asymptote Journal, among others, and has been featured by PEN America, Writer’s Digest, and PBS. Her work has been set to music and visual art, adapted into short films, and performed internationally at venues including the Smithsonian National Museum, The Writers Studio, the Tribute World Trade Center, the United Nations World Food Programme, and the Canadian Parliament.