Transnational Series: Diana Arterian and Marina Omar with Aria Aber

Afghan poet Nadia Anjuman (1980-2005) drew on the lineage of Persian and Sufi writing and her life under Taliban rule, attending to love, oppression, myth, and devotion through lyrics that both embrace and resist tradition.

Anjuman grew up in Herat, Afghanistan, a city known for centuries for its poetry. While the Taliban was in power, Anjuman met with other women in what appeared to be a needlepoint school, one of the few sanctioned pastimes for women, to secretly discuss literature and poetry. After the fall of the Taliban, Anjuman was finally able to attend university. She wrote and published a celebrated volume of poetry and was set to publish another before her early death due to domestic violence. Selections from both of Anjuman’s collections are presented here for the first time in English.

Diana Arterian holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and is the author of the poetry collections Agrippina the Younger, which received the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award, and Playing Monster :: Seiche. Her work has been recognized with fellowships from the Banff Centre, Caldera, Millay Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. A poetry editor at Noemi Press, she writes “The Annotated Nightstand” column at Lit Hub and lives in Los Angeles.

Marina Omar moved to the United States in 2001 from Afghanistan, where she experienced the Taliban's brutal ban on Afghan women's education. Once in the US, Marina pursued her education and received her PhD from the University of Virginia in Political Science in 2016. She published an article on the Afghan constitutional selection in British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies in 2022. She has also co-translated a poetry collection by Nadia Anjuman, a female poet who lived in Afghanistan around the same time as her.

Moderator Aria Aber was born and raised in Germany and now lives in the United States. Her debut poetry collection, Hard Damage, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Whiting Award. Her first novel, Good Girl, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize in Fiction, the New Adult Prize, and longlisted for the Center of Fiction’s Debut Prize and the Dublin Literary Award. She serves as the poetry editor of Kismet, as a contributing editor at The Yale Review, and works as an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Vermont. She divides her time between Vermont and Brooklyn.