Photo by Gretchen Carlson at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, MA.
AWARDS and honors
2023 Muslim Narrative Power Fellow, Muslim Counterpublics Lab
2023 DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium Fellow
2022 Anaphora Writing Residency, Partial Fellowship (unable to attend)
2021 Desert Nights, Rising Stars Conference Fellow, Virginia G. Piper Center of Creative Writing at Arizona State University
2020 Scholastic National Writing Awards Juror, Science Fiction & Fantasy
2019 Community-Engaged Poetry Foundation Incubator Fellow
2016-2017 Islamic Scholarship Fund Recipient
Select Performances
2022 Reader at An Assembly of Moths: Afghanistan One Year Later, A Gathering Through Art, hosted by the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association and City Lore.
2021 Reader at Live Lit West Reading Series, presented by UO MFA Poets and Writers.
2018 Reader at Newtown Literary Journal Issue #13 Launch Reading at The Local, Queens, NY.
2017 Performer at The Moth x Muslim Writers Collective Event at Thoughtworks, New York, NY.
2016 Performer at The Muslim Monologues, hosted by the Harvard Islamic Society at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
2015 Reader and panelist at Distant Attachments: Unsettling Contemporary Afghan Diasporic Art, hosted by the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association at City Lore Gallery, New York, NY.
2015 Reader at the Muslim Writers Collective Open Mic and Town Hall: A Parking Space Called America at Thoughtworks, New York, NY.
Short Bio
Seelai Karzai is a poet, cultural organizer, and refugee advocate from Queens, New York. A member of the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association, she has earned fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and the Virginia G. Piper Center and attended workshops at Tin House. Her work has appeared in Northwest Review, Lantern Review, and in the New Moons anthology edited by Kazim Ali from Red Hen Press. She is co-editor, with Sahar Muradi, of EMERGENC(Y): Afghan Lives Beyond the Forever War: An Anthology of Writing from Afghanistan and its Diaspora. Seelai earned her MFA from the University of Oregon. She is currently at work on her debut book of poems.
Slightly Longer Bio
Seelai Karzai is a poet, educator, and cultural organizer from Queens, New York. Her work has appeared in Northwest Review, Lantern Review, Newtown Literary Journal and elsewhere. She earned a full fellowship from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing for their online 2021 Desert Nights, Rising Stars Conference.
In 2019, she was an Emerging Poets Incubator Fellow, an initiative hosted by the Poetry Foundation and Crescendo Literary for poets whose commitment to their communities is a vital part of their artistic practice. As part of the 2019 Poetry Incubator for community-engaged poets, Seelai was given the opportunity to submit a proposal for a project that would benefit her community. This proposal, The Afghan Literary Futures Project, was selected by her peers in the program to receive the grant. Hosted through the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association (AAAWA), the Project offers free multi-genre creative writing workshops to emerging Afghan writers with the goal of cultivating a unique literary community in the Afghan diaspora.
Seelai earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon, where she taught college-level poetry workshops and first-year writing. Before this, she earned a BA in English Literature and Classics from Hunter College in New York City. She also earned an MTS in women, gender and sexuality studies, and religion from Harvard University. In her free time, she loves baking and entertaining her orange tabby cat.