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2021 Philly Loves Poetry Interview and Readings Series

Dilruba Ahmed is the author Bring Now the Angels (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), with poems featured in New York Times Magazine, The Best American Poetry 2019, and podcasts such as The Slowdown and Poetry Unbound.  Her debut book of poetry, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press, 2011), won the Bakeless Prize.  Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares.  Ahmed is part of the low-residency MFA faculty at Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers and Chatham University’s MFA Program.  She also teaches with Hugo House and The Writing Lab. Website: www.dilrubaahmed.com/

“In Bring Now the Angels, Dilruba Ahmed sings a complex song of loss: loss of a father, loss of a culture, and loss of country, both the original country and the one in which one is raised. In tightly-wound lyrics, Ahmed questions what it is to live in this present moment where loss seems to build almost hourly. With stringent rhetoric and beautiful imagery, Ahmed shows us what it means to be ‘[c]aught between one world / and the next . . .’”—C. Dale Young

“There are books of poetry whose service approaches public ritual of private feeling, Dilruba Ahmed’s Bring Now the Angels is one of those books. It is a prayer to see more clearly one’s grief and one’s relationship to the vibrancy and complexity of parents and children and the natural world. This is a book that asks about neglect and regret in order to understand how we might care for the living and the dead. What a healing collection of poems Ahmed has given us.” —Patrick Rosal

“Dilruba Ahmed’s luminous second book of poems, Bring Now the Angels, considers layered relationships and identities: adults to parents and children; bystanders as public witnesses; humans to angels, to water, or bureaucracy — or, as in ‘Zodiac,’ to the self.” —Naomi Shihab Nye, New York Times Magazine

Charles S. Carr, Host