Join Kundiman for this special reading at the 2026 Dodge Poetry Festival.
How can a poetics of kinship inform or transform our understanding of community? How does writing about our connections with others help us navigate the social and political structures of our world? Join Kundiman for this reading featuring poets Fatimah Asghar, Sanam Sheriff, and R. A. Villanueva, whose works explore embodiment, presence, and connection.
This reading is part of the Dodge Poetry Festival, so please get tickets for the festival in order to join us for our reading. Visit NJPAC’s website to learn more about the event. We hope to see you there!
Fatimah Asghar is an artist who spans across different genres and themes. They have been featured in various outlets such as TIME, NPR, Teen Vogue and the Forbes 30 Under 30 List. Their first book of poems was If They Come For Us and their debut novel, When We Were Sisters, was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the inaugural Carol Shield’s Prize. Along with Safia Elhillo they co-edited an anthology for Muslim people who are also women, trans, gender non-conforming, and/ or queer, Halal If You Hear Me, which was built around the radical idea that there are as many ways of being Muslim as there are Muslim people in the world. They are the writer and co-creator of the Emmy-nominated Brown Girls, a web series that highlights friendship among women of color that was in a development deal with HBO, and wrote and directed Got Game, a short film that follows a queer South Asian Muslim woman trying to navigate a kink party after being single, and wrote, directed and starred in Retrieval, a lyrical short film that follows the process of a soul retrieval in the aftermath of sexual assault. They are also a writer and co-producer on Ms. Marvel on Disney +, and wrote Episode 5, Time and Again. They are an ISF and Sundance Doris Duke Fellow and a 1497 Fellow. Their second book of poetry, Daughter of the Mountains, is forthcoming July 2026 as is their short mockumentary, Anatomy of a F*boy.
Sanam Sheriff is a queer poet, artist, and educator from Bangalore, India. Their debut poetry collection HUM won the Backwaters Press Poetry Prize and will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in October, 2026. Sanam’s work has been published in Poetry Magazine, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Indiana Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Outlook India, and elsewhere. Sanam holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. From 2022-2025, they served as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College. Sanam lives in Philadelphia, where they curate The Poets’ Studio at Twelve Gates Arts. In fall, 2026, they will begin teaching Poetry at Haverford College.
R. A. Villanueva is the author of two award-winning collections of poetry: A Holy Dread (Alice James Books, 2026), and Reliquaria (U. of Nebraska Press, 2014). New work has been featured by the Academy of American Poets and National Public Radio—and his writing appears widely in international publications such as Poetry London and The Poetry Review. His honors include commendations from the Forward Prizes, and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. He lives in Brooklyn.