Seelai Karzai

Seelai Karzai is a writer, educator, and cultural organizer from Queens, New York. A member of the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association, her work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, as well as in the anthology New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims edited by Kazim Ali and published by Red Hen Press. Her writing has earned support from the Vermont Arts Council, The Seventh Wave Digital Residency, Muslim Counterpublics Lab, DreamYard’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and the Incubator for Community-Engaged Poets. Along with Sahar Muradi, she co-edited EMERGENC(Y): Afghan Lives Beyond the Forever War: An Anthology of Writing from Afghanistan and its Diaspora, an anthology of artistic responses to the ongoing crisis that Afghans have been navigating for several decades, which has been exacerbated by the 2021 US/NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan. The writers address themes of trauma, suffering, and displacement, while also moving beyond dominant representations of Afghans as passive victims by critiquing a world of impenetrable borders to reimagine and reconstruct their futures. Seelai earned an MFA from the University of Oregon, where she also taught college-level poetry workshops and first-year writing. She lives in Vermont, where she enjoys baking and is currently at work on her debut book of poems.