Writer-IN-RESIDENCE
January 6-21, 2027
Saima Afreen
Saima Afreen is a poet, teaching-artist, fictionist, essayist, abstract painter and has been a journalist. Her research interests are: ethnogastronomy, gastro poetry, food rhetorics, and culinary linguistics in creative writing praxis. Her literary pieces have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Indian Literature, The Bellevue Literary Review, HCE Review, Barely South Review, The Bellingham Review, The Roanoke Review, The Stillwater Review, The McNeese Review, The Nassau Review, The Oklahoma Review, Apricity Magazine, Summerset Review, Staghill Literary Journal, The Notre Dame Review, Lunch Ticket, Honest Ulsterman, Ignatian Literary Magazine, Watershed Review, Dreich Magazine, Chronogram Magazine, and Existere among others. She is a PhD candidate with a concentration in Creative Writing at Illinois State University (ISU), the US.
She is the author of poetry collection Sin of Semantics (Copper Coin) and a poetry chapbook titled Winter Biomythography (Press 254). She was a Sutherland Fellow at the Publications Unit of ISU. She also serves as Assistant Poetry Editor for Spoon River Poetry Review, the flagship poetry journal of ISU. She was awarded the Charles Wallace Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of Kent, the UK (Spring 2019). She was the writer-in-residence for Fall at Villa Sarkia Writers’ Residency, Finland. She was the alternate-finalist for Jack Kerouac Writers in Residence Project, Florida for Fall 2024. She received Casa Uno Residency in Costa Rica for Poetry (forthcoming).
Artist Statement
My research and creative work bring together the concepts of culinary linguistics, food rhetorics, and South Asian diaspora foodways. For the Good Hart Artist Residency, I’d like to develop a poetry manuscript centralizing food as the focal point in an immigrant narrative and situating ethnogastronomic details within the work using different creative writing methods, forms, tools, and styles. In my poetry manuscript, I will use food memory to construct and, at the same time, challenge the nostalgia of home and showcase how home, or an idea of home, can be created using food. In this collection, I will focus on the body as a site of archival inquiry.