Tarfia is a Bangladeshi-American poet, performer, and educator. She received an MFA in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University and is the author of Seam (SIU 2014), which United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey calls “beautiful and necessary, as well as Register of Eliminated Villages, (Graywolf 2017). Her honors and awards include a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Ploughshares Cohen Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, as well as scholarships and fellowships from Kundiman, Bread Loaf, Kenyon Review, Sewanee, and Vermont Studio Center. Her poems appear in Poetry Magazine, Poetry Daily, Oxford American, Ploughshares, jubilat, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. Poems have also been anthologized in Best New Poets 2013 (Meridian), The Book of Scented Things (Rose O’Neill Literary House Press), Please Excuse this Poem: 100 Poems for the Next Generation (Viking/Penguin), and Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry (University of Southern Carolina Press). Recent prose appears in LA Review of Books, Poetry Foundation, and Necessary Fiction. Tarfia has collaborated with photographer Elizabeth Herman, emcee and producer Brooklyn Shanti, and composer Jacob Cooper, and has served as an editor for Blackbird, Asian American Literary Review, Four Way Review, Orison Books, and New England Review, and co-directs the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press and Video Series with Jamaal May. She lives in Detroit, MI, and is the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor of Poetry in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.

Website: www.tfaizullah.com

Employment

• Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor at University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers' Program (August 2014 - )

Degrees

• Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University (August 2009)

Genres of Interest

Fiction, Creative nonfiction, Playwriting, Screenwriting, Poetry