Sheema Kalbasi

Sheema Kalbasi is an award-winning Iranian, Danish, and American poet, writer, literary translator, and humanitarian. She is a Pushcart Prize winner and the recipient of a United Nations humanitarian award, and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

Wings Stronger Than Any Fear won the Rick Campbell Chapbook Award (Anhinga Press, 2026). The War Took Our Names was selected for the Allison Joseph Series (Seven Kitchens Press, 2026). Jahan Malek Khatun: The Princess Poet of Fourteenth-Century Persia (Daraja Press, 2026) brings a forgotten medieval voice to modern readers. Spoon and Shrapnel was published by Daraja Press in 2024. Echoes in Exile (PRA Publishing, 2006) was featured on Stony Brook University's Women and Gender Studies reading list.

As an editor and translator, Kalbasi has championed women poets across cultures. Her anthologies include Seven Valleys of Love: A Bilingual Anthology of Women Poets from Medieval Persia to Present-Day Iran, The Poetry of Iranian Women, Marginalia: The Women of Danish Poetry, and Selected Poetry of Christian Rimestad. She is a nominee for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and a grantee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands.

Her poems, translations, and essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Copper Nickel, Atlanta Review, PEN America, Diode Poetry Journal, Black Lawrence Press, and Asymptote, among others. Her work has been set to music, adapted into short films, and performed internationally at The Writers Studio, the Smithsonian National Museum, the Canadian Parliament, the Tribute World Trade Center, and the United Nations World Food Programme.

A voice for the displaced and an advocate against gender apartheid, Kalbasi writes to honor the resilience of the silenced.