Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa was born in India on March 6, 1969, and grew up in India and Nepal. She received her BA and MA in English literature from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University. In 1995, she left India to pursue her MA in professional writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, then received her MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Dhompa is the author of three books of poetry: My rice tastes like the lake (Apogee Press, 2011); In the Absent Everyday (Apogee Press, 2005); and Rules of the House (Apogee Press, 2002). She is also the author of the nonfiction books The Politics of Sorrow: Unity and Allegiance Across Tibetan Exile (Columbia University Press, 2025) and A Home in Tibet (Penguin Books India, 2014).

Dhomba, who is the first Tibetan poet to be published in English, has received a Cultural Equity Grant from the Arts Commission of San Francisco and fellowships from both Hedgebrook and MacDowell. She is an associate professor of English at Villanova University.