Dilruba Ahmed

Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Bring Now the Angels (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) and Dhaka Dust (Graywolf, 2011) which won the Bakeless Literary Prize for poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her poetry has appeared in Blackbird, Cream City Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, and Indivisible: Contemporary South Asian American Poetry.

Of her first book, a Hyphen Magazine reviewer observed, “What’s so promising about Dhaka Dust is precisely that Ahmed never evades our contemporary moment, taking on a globalizing, anxiety-stricken world while always focusing on the contradictory ways that her speakers live through them. Over the course of these poems, Ahmed subtly crafts the emotionally complex terrain that captures the sprawl and dislocation that shape our early 21st century psychology.”

A writer with roots in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Bangladesh, Ahmed earned BPhil and MAT degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She has taught in Chatham University’s Low-Residency MFA program.