Prageeta Sharma

Prageeta Sharma was born in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1972, shortly after her parents emigrated from India in 1969. She attended Simon’s Rock College of Bard for her undergraduate studies and received an MFA in poetry from Brown University in 1995 and an MA in media studies from The New School in 2002.

Sharma is the author of five poetry collections, including Grief Sequence (Wave Books, 2019) and The Opening Question (Fence Books, 2004), winner of the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize.

About her work, poet Lisa Jarnot says,

Prageeta Sharma’s poems are as ever imbued with a crafty playfulness by which the appearances of the I, the you, and the we transcend tricks of the trade. Sharma cultivates mindscapes, scrutinizing the self in the midst of blooming and shifting guaranteed to exhilarate the reader.

Sharma received a 2010 Howard Foundation Grant and has taught in the creative writing program at The New School in New York City and in the Individualized BA program at Goddard College in Vermont. She was a professor and director of the creative writing program at the University of Montana in Missoula. She is currently the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College, and lives in Claremont, California.