Raena Shirali is the author of GILT (YesYes Books, 2017). Her honors include a 2016 Pushcart Prize, the 2016 Cosmonauts Avenue Poetry Prize, the 2014 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, & a 'Discovery' / Boston Review Poetry Prize in 2013. She has also been recognized as a finalist for the 2016 Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize & a 2014 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. Her poems & reviews have appeared in Blackbird, Ninth Letter, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, Pleiades, Four Way Review, & elsewhere. She was raised in Charleston, SC, where she recently taught English at College of Charleston, her alma mater. Born in Houston, Texas, the Indian American poet earned her MFA from The Ohio State University. She currently lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where she is the Spring 2017 Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University's Stadler Center for Poetry, & serves as a poetry reader for Muzzle Magazine.

Books by Raena Shirali:

Other poems on the web by Raena Shirali:
Two poems
"Diwali: New Moon"
Two poems
"tristesse"
"Now You Are Eating"
"Monsoon Season, Ine"
"Looking Through a Telescope at the Moon the Day Neil Armstrong Died"
"say i am a series of creeks"
"Aubade"
"Tiny Spills"
"dayaan summoning magic"

Raena Shirali's Website.

Raena Shirali on Twitter.

Raena Shirali on Facebook.

About Gilt:

"To read Gilt is to open windows steamed with bright and exacting language, worlds where a 'cobra is a garland—no, the cobra / is a man's knuckles, a girl's hair clumped / between them…' Shirali's tough-tender debut embroiders lavish Indian weddings and Diwali festivals with the reckonings of a relationship's end. The rich wisdom you glean from the powerful pages of Gilt will leave you spent and enchanted."
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil

"Raena Shirali is a poet who keeps asking what poems can actually do, and these formally inventive lyrics ask for activity, for travel. Her comment on culture, on identity, on justice is her comment on poetry. It is not fixed; and if it is, it shouldn't be. Gilt is a book of danger and sarcasm and heart."
—Jericho Brown