Solmaz Sharif

Solmaz Sharif is the author of Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the 2022 Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize. Her first book, Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), was a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Notable Book. Her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University. Her poetry has appeared in Harpers, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Granta, New Republic, Poetry and the New York Times.

Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, she grew up in the US. She holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. She is currently the Shirley Shenker Assistant Professor of English at U.C. Berkeley.