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Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani American poet, translator, and singer. She is the author of What Is Not Beautiful (Glass Poetry Press, 2018) and her debut collection, Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved (Tupelo Press, 2020), is a winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Poem-A-Day, Glass, Gulf Coast, Meridian, and The Margins, and her translations in PBS Frontline and Words Without Borders.
Adeeba holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and an Emerging Poets fellowship from Poets House.
Below is the film trailer for An American Prayer, featuring “A Song For My Nation”
[…] Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani-American poet who spoke to us from her home in New Jersey. Throughout the pandemic, she has divided her time between writing and music. She has been learning to sing a form of traditional Hindustani poetry during this time. In her practice, poetry and music are both separate and intertwined. While she has long been interested in music, it was only a few years ago when she was able to begin formal study. She began with Western classical music but has since fallen out of touch with her Western classical teacher due to the pandemic. She has, however, maintained contact with her Hindustani classical teacher who helps her learn different scales and modes of music specific to this poetic-musical discipline. Much of her poetry in English is informed by her poetry in Urdu. To hear more about how music and poetry, Western culture and Southeast Asian culture blend in Talukder’s work as well as live readings of her work, listen to the complete interview. […]