Solmaz Sharif

Solmaz Sharif was born in Istanbul to Iranian parents. She holds degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and from New York University. 

Sharif is the author of Customs (Graywolf, 2022) and Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. 

Sharif is the recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Foundation. Her other awards are the “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. 

Sharif taught at Arizona State University where she directed a Poetry for the People program and is currently an associate professor of English and the Shirley Shenker Chair of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley.