Volunteer Experts
March 28, 2024 2024-05-07 18:04Volunteer Experts
Shahid Nadeem
see the section National Advisory Board
Ilona Yusuf
Ilona Yusuf is a poet and editor; also, in daily life, a designer and printmaker. Her poems have been published once in book form, Picture This by Alhamra Publishing in 2001, and thereafter in local and international literary journals, online and in print. Ilona has edited for literary journals like The Alhamra Literary Review, Vallum Special Issue Pakistan; and since 2017 to date works as Associate Editor of The Aleph Review, a yearly Pakistani art and literature journal featuring local and international writing. She has also freelanced for several local art and features magazines, and written essays on Pakistani poetry in English, mostly for international publications. Websites: https://www.thealephreview.com/post/tribute-part-2 and https://vallum.wordpress.com/2017/01/19/vallum-featured-essay-ilona-yusuf/
Shadab Zeest Hashmi
Shadab Zeest Hashmi is a Pakistani-American poet and essayist. Winner of the San Diego Book Award, Sable’s Hybrid Book Prize, the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize, she is nominated for the Pushcart multiple times. Her work engages with history, cultures of encounter, and the life of spirit and aesthetics. Her two poetry collections are Kohl and Chalk and Baker of Tarifa. Her volume of prose and poetry titled Ghazal Cosmopolitan is praised by Marilyn Hacker as a “marvelous interweaving of poetry, scholarship, literary criticism and memoir.” Her latest, Comb is a rumination across the ancient Silk Road, of which her birthplace Peshawar is a significant outpost. Zeest Hashmi’s poetry is translated into Spanish, Turkish, Bosnian and Urdu, and has appeared in anthologies and journals worldwide, like in McSweeney’s In the Shape of a Human Body, I am Visiting the Earth, and The Best Asian Poetry 2021. An MFA teacher at San Diego State University, her work is included in the Language Arts curriculum. Website: https://shadabhashmi.com/
Faiqa Mansab
Faiqa Mansab is the author of the critically acclaimed This House of Clay and Water, Penguin 2017. She is a British Chevening Scholar and Saari Fellow, and has written for Medusa, Lucy Writer’s Platform, The Missing Slate and others. She received her MFA with distinction from Kingston Upon Thames, with the “Best MFA Thesis Award.” Her new novel is forthcoming from Neem Tree Press UK and Penguin India in 2024. Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/faiqa-mansab-57bb41149
Kanza Javed
Represented by United Talent Agency, and Curtis Brown UK, Kanza Javed is an MFA in Fiction from West Virginia University, where she won the Rebecca Mason Perry Award. She is awarded two state-department research scholarships – University of Massachusetts and Arizona State University, and her debut novel, Ashes, Wine and Dust was shortlisted for the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize and is still a national bestseller in South Asia. Her short stories are published in American Literary Review, The Punch Magazine, Salamander, Greensboro Review and The Malahat Review. She won the Reynolds Price Prize for Fiction (Center for Women Writers, Salem College), and is a finalist for the 51st New Millennium Writing Award, Salamander Short Fiction Award and the Robert Watson Literary Prize. Her second book, a collection of short stories, What Remains After a Fire is shortlisted for the 2022 literary awards by the Sante Fe Writer’s Prize and the New American Press.
