Quintessential Listening: Poetry Online Radio Presents Sophia Naz

Sophia Naz is a bilingual poet, essayist, author, editor, and translator. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, in 2016 for creative nonfiction and in 2018 for poetry.  Her work features in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Poetry International Rotterdam, The Adirondack Review,  The Wire, Chicago Quarterly Review, Blaze Vox, Scroll, The Daily O, Cafe Dissensus, Guftugu, Pratik, Gallerie International, Coldnoon, VAYAVYA, The Bangalore Review, Madras Courier, etc Her poetry collections are Peripheries (2015), Pointillism (2017) and Date Palms (2017).  Shehnaz, a biography of her mother published from Penguin Random House in November 2019. Sophia was born in Pakistan, to ethnically Indian parents and emigrated to the US in 1988.  She was undocumented for 8 years before receiving political asylum in 1996. Sophia has lived in Glen Ellen California since 2010. In 2017 she lost her home to wildfires and her latest collection of poetry, Zero Period is a meditation on personal and collective loss as well as a consecration of our common humanity in the face of toxic identity politics. Her site is SophiaNaz.com