Ellen Kombiyil is a recent transplant from Bangalore, India, where she lived for nearly eleven years, leading writing workshops and teaching yoga. She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and has read, performed or taught workshops at the annual Prakriti Poetry festival in Chennai, the Raedleaf Poetry Awards in Hyderabad, and Lekhana in Bangalore. Originally from Syracuse, New York, and a graduate of the University of Chicago, she now lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

Books by Ellen Kombiyil:

Other poems on the web by Ellen Kombiyil:
Two poems
Two poems
"Letter to the Gods of the L&D Ward"
Two poems
Two poems
Two poems
"Cold Morning Zazen"

Ellen Kombiyil on Twitter.

About Histories of the Future Perfect:

"Histories of the Future Perfect is a shimmering book, both delicate and bold. Interstellar travel, girlhood, erotics, American history: Ellen Kombiyil ranges both far and near, with a command both intellectual and sensual. These are poems that test out life partly by imagining other lives-other lives one might live, the lives of Mary Todd Lincoln. Delicate lyrics zap us through the cosmos and back into memory; persona poems bring us into the specificity of grief. This is a poet who can toggle between bikinis and trilobites, between astrophysics and pop culture, between elegy and premonition. Kombiyil's work is alive to whiplash our lives in the timeloops of the universe. 'Let sprinklers equal X, an absence that is manifest./Now solve for bare feet glisten. Now step on constellations.' This is a poetry of rigorous, ingenious, warmhearted exploration"
—Maureen N. McLane

"Innovative, ecstatic, and emotionally poetent, these poems shimmer with there skill and acumen, and indeed it's been a long time since I've been as excited about a new book as I am about this one."
—Ravi Shankar