Sarah Ghazal Ali | The Laureate Writers Series

The Laureate Writers Series program for Tuesday, March 3 will feature Sarah Ghazal Ali, an American poet, essayist, and literary editor who is currently an Assistant Professor at Macalester College in St. Paul. The event will take place at the Blue Heron Coffeehouse at 7 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

As a young American with Pakistani roots, Sarah Ghazal Ali has distinguished herself by receiving significant awards. Her first book of poetry, Theophanies, was winner of the GLCA New Writers Award and the California Book Award. The book was also a finalist for the 2024 Society of Midlands Authors and Kate Tufts Discover Award.

She has received several prestigious fellowships and is currently Poetry Editor for West Branch, the literary magazine of Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.

Sarah Ghazal Ali brings cross-cultural perspectives to her writing. “I trace my interest in poetry—and to language as a technology—back to my childhood auditory immersion in both rhythmic Qur’an recitations and Urdu ghazals. Arabic was the charged language in which I prayed, and Urdu was the language through which I gave name to my emotions. Poetry continues to be where I go to discover my thinking.”

I wrote poems in diaries as a child,” she says, “but began writing formally as a university student. My fifth-grade English teacher made us write out dictionary definitions when we misbehaved in class. The slow meticulousness of that task and the granular level of attention we were asked to pay to individual words made language a source of wonder for me. I first began calling myself a poet after befriending other poets. Writing and dreaming in community made me braver.”

Her work provides a fascinating roadmap for a journey of spiritual discovery. “I was looking for models for my living and so turned to the matriarchs in Abrahamic scripture and sacred history as examples of how to chart my path as a woman of faith in a corrosive and corrupt world. I experimented with fixed and invented forms…to parable my own place in a matrilineal line. The poems try to speak back against time to women like Eve, Sarah, Hajar, and Mary, and to peer into inherited silences and elisions.”

The publication of Theophanies was an adventure and a surprise. “All I hoped for when Theophanies was published was that it would be read. For the book to pass through many hands…is a dream I never dared to dream.”

Following her presentation, Sarah Ghazal Ali will respond to audience questions. The comments will be followed by an open mic session, during which audience members can read short selections of their own original work.

The Laureate Writers Series is sponsored by the Blue Heron Coffee House, by Chapter 2 Books of Winona, by Friends of the Winona Public Library, by Laurie Lucas, by Sara and Richard Ricker, and Joseph and Penny Duffy.