Zubair Ahmed was born in 1988 and raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In 2005, his family won the Diversity Visa Lottery, which granted them the opportunity to immigrate to the US. Ahmed now studies mechanical engineering and creative writing at Stanford University. He is the author of the chapbook Ashulia (Tavern Books, 2011).
Zubair Ahmed's raw, visionary poems are dense with history—the history of the poet, his family, and the Bangladeshi and American cultures that shaped him. Ahmed's work casts light on the experience of being displaced and replaced, relocated and dislocated. "I start my car, drive south / Until I hit a street / That may or may not exist." These are bracingly original poems ushered into being by a prodigious new voice in American poetry.
"When reading Zubair Ahmed I feel as though I am both witnessing and taking part in an ecstatic, lyric experience. Ahmed's work is not just a blues forged out of the Bangladesh landscape, these poems are also a celebration of the world as a whole—a sometimes complicated, dark celebration, but a celebration all the same."
—Matthew Dickman
McSweeney's Poetry Series
