Listening as witness: Anthropological poetry at Sapiens Magazine

New York, NY – SAPIENS magazine is excited to share news of its 2025 digital poet-in-residence: Uzma Falak. Through this position, Uzma will explore ethnographic poetry as a site of refusal and witnessing. Her poems will integrate 2019 field recordings from Kashmir during the longest siege in the region’s history.

“The poet Audre Lorde famously wrote, ‘Poetry is not a luxury,’ and yet, despite her beautiful and powerful affirmations, it does feel so amid the catastrophes of our times,” says Uzma. “I deeply appreciate this digital residency opportunity, and I hope I can use this time to dwell a little longer within the interstices of possibility that poetry offers—and continue to witness and hope, even when both are rendered impossible every day.”

Uzma Falak was born and raised in Srinagar, Kashmir. She is a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Heidelberg and a lecturer at the University of Tübingen. Her academic work, poetry, essays, and reportage have appeared in several publications, such as English Language Notes, Anthropology and Humanism, The Baffler, and collections such as Poetry as Evidence, Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War,  Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak?, among others. In 2017, she won an honorable mention in the Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s Ethnographic Poetry Award.

Her writings, visual and sound work have been showcased at several galleries, festivals, universities, and theaters such as the West Space, Tate Modern Exchange, Rizq Art Initiative, Art Gallery of Guelph, Rice Cinema, among others. She was an artist-in-residence at Melbourne’s Liquid Architecture as part of the cohort Capture All: A Sonic Investigation, focused on exploring sound/listening as resources of power, capture, and extraction.

Uzma’s project at SAPIENS will be based on her fieldwork in Kashmir and will draw on her field recordings. “Through my poems, I seek to foreground several registers of audibility and inaudibility,” she says, “and to unpack ways in which we can recuperate listening from extractive practices. I am particularly interested in exploring how listening can be mobilized toward practices of subversion, stealth, and refusal.”

“I am also looking forward to receiving submissions for the call for the next themed poetry series and working closely with the SAPIENS team,” she says.

This will be the fifth year of the program. SAPIENS’ 2024 poet-in-residence, Alma Simba, contributed seven original poems to create an “imagined and constructed archive” that explores the marginalization of Black African women and their stories while highlighting the value of women’s voices and lives. Alma also contributed as a co-editor to the special themed poetry collection that launched recently, Poets Resist, Refuse, and Find a Way Through, and she shadowed Sociocultural/Linguistics Editor Emily Sekine on developmental editing of an essay.

“As someone who straddles the worlds of academia and art,” Alma said. “I deeply appreciate the work that SAPIENS is doing to connect academic issues to larger publics.”

Past poets include 2023 poet-in-resident Toiba Naseema, who published an in-depth introduction about Kashmir and three original poems; 2022 resident Jason Vasser-Elong, who published six original poems; and inaugural poet-in-residence in 2020–2021 Día Joy Wright, who contributed original autoethnographic poems and co-authored the SAPIENS article “What Is Anthropological Poetry?”

Anthropological poems bring readers insights, emotions, aspirations, and interventions from skilled observers of the human and nonhuman worlds to reflect on “what it means to be vitally human and to make sense of the human experience.”

CONTACT:
Christine Weeber, Poetry Editor
SAPIENS Magazine
editor@sapiens.org
212.683.5000