About

Hajjar Baban is the author of the chapbooks Relative to Blood (Penmanship Books, 2018) and What I Know of the Mountains (Anhinga Press, 2019), winner of the 2018 Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize. A Pakistan-born Afghan Kurdish poet, she is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin - Madison where she was a member of the First Wave Scholarship Program. A 2021 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow, she is a recent graduate of an MFA in Poetry at the University of Virginia. A Pushcart Prize winning poet, Baban served as the 2017 Detroit Youth Poet Laureate and has received the Charles M. Hart Jr. Writers of Promise Award, George B. Hill Poetry Award, the Ron Wallace Poetry Thesis Prize, The Gearhart Poetry Prize, and the Matt Clark Editors' Choice Prize in poetry. Baban has work appearing in Guernica, Pleiades, and Muzzle Magazine, among others and has recently received writing support from Community of Writers Workshop and Tin House Summer Workshop. She spends most of her time avoiding running from herself.