Sarah Ghazal Ali, author of Theophanies
Poetry Category, sponsored by Wellington Management, Inc.
Each week leading up to the 37th annual Minnesota Book Awards, we are featuring exclusive interviews with our finalists. You can also watch the authors in conversation with their fellow category finalists here.
What inspired you to write this book – or inspired you while writing it?
There are so many things in life—language, elders, culture, faith—that I struggle to maintain a relationship to. No one else is going to do it for me, and poetry became a place to work to name, cherish, and remake my relationship with the life I inherited. I was inspired by my mother and grandmothers, and by the matrilineal line as an alternate path through history. The 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan also haunts this book and charges the poems with that push and pull between naming and erasure. Theophanies is deeply inspired by women in scripture, particularly Sarah, Mary, and Hajjar.
What is one detail you wanted to include in this book, but couldn’t find a place for?
I wanted to weave in the story of Zuleikha, thought to be the wife of Potiphar in the Bible. Zuleikha appeared in a number of poems as an effaced, haunted woman, but ultimately those poems didn’t quite fit in the book.
Tell us about someone (whose name isn’t on the cover!) who proved instrumental to the creation of this book.
My dear friend and fellow poet Patrycja Humienik, who was the first person to read an early version of the manuscript in full. I was terrified sending it to her, but astonished by her care. She read it ceremoniously, and asked me sharp and necessary questions. Her reading made a wider readership feel possible.
Please tell us something about yourself that is not widely known. (It doesn’t have to be about the book in question – or even about your writing at all!)
I put habanero hot sauce on just about everything I eat. Deep down, I worry I don’t care for the taste of food itself, and food is just a vehicle for hot sauce!
Share your thoughts about the role and value of libraries.
In the words of bell hooks: “one of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library.” Libraries are radically inclusive, non-hierarchical spaces—where else are necessary services provided for free to all, no matter their identity or socioeconomic background? I wouldn’t be a writer if I weren’t a reader, and I wouldn’t have become a reader were it not for my childhood library. The library is without a doubt one of the most important institutions in our communities.
Sarah Ghazal Ali is a poet, essayist, and editor. A Stadler Fellow and recipient of The Sewanee Review poetry prize, her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, and other publications. She is the poetry editor for West Branch.