Sheema Kalbasi

Sheema Kalbasi is an Iranian Danish American poet, humanitarian, and historian. She is a Pushcart Prize–winning poet, a nominee for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, a recipient of a United Nations humanitarian award, and a grantee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands.Her books include Echoes in Exile (PRA Publishing, 2006), which was listed in Stony Brook University’s Women and Gender Studies curriculum; Seven Valleys of Love (PRA Publishing, 2008); The Poetry of Iranian Women (Reel Content, 2008); Spoon and Shrapnel (Daraja Press, 2024); and Jahan Malek Khatun: The Princess Poet of Fourteenth-Century Persia (Daraja Press, 2026).Her writing has appeared in The Kenyon Review, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and publications by Black Lawrence Press, among others, and has been featured by PEN America, Writer’s Digest, PBS, and NPR. Her poems have been set to music and visual art, adapted into short films, and performed internationally at venues including the Smithsonian National Museum, The Writers Studio, the Tribute World Trade Center, the United Nations World Food Programme (UNWFP), and the Canadian Parliament.