POEM PLUS PROMPT (PPP) with Dilruba Ahmed

With a poem by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the focus of our conversation, we’ll discover what we can learn about narrative detail, metaphor, sensory description, tone, and more. After our discussion, we’ll commit to a round of shared quiet writing time inspired by a related prompt.

Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Bring Now the Angels (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), with poems featured in New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, and Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama. Her debut book of poetry, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, & Virginia Quarterly Review. Her poems have also been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2019 (Scribner), Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books), Literature: The Human Experience (Bedford/St. Martin’s) and elsewhere. Ahmed is the recipient of The Florida Review’s Editors’ Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She holds degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers. She has taught with Chatham University’s MFA Program, Hugo House in Seattle, and workshops across the U.S. In January 2021, Ahmed joined the faculty at Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers.

Classes & consultations: https://www.dilrubaahmed.com/writing-lab