Shertok Lama

Samyak Shertok’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, Blackbird, The Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Iowa Review, KROnline, New England Review, Shenandoah, Waxwing, and elsewhere. He has been awarded the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award for Poetry, the AWP Intro Journals Award, and the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry. A finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Jake Adam York Prize and a nominee for the Pushcart Prize, The Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net, he has received scholarships and fellowships from Aspen Words, the Bread Loaf, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah where he received the Steffensen Cannon Fellowship, the Tanner Humanities Fellowship, and the Graduate Research Fellowship and was the Poetry Editor for Quarterly West. He’s currently a Visiting Writer-in-Residence and Hughes Fellow in Creative Writing at Southern Methodist University. 

Areas of Interest

Elegy

Poetry of Exile

Poetry of Witness

Ghazal

Epic

Selected Publications

“Dear Unborn Moonbug,” Gulf Coast (forthcoming)

“A Haunting,” “Today I’ll Love Nomad,” “Himalayas Driver's License,” “Love in a Time of Revolution,” “The Day the Crow Perches on the Fig Branch,” The Iowa Review (forthcoming)

“No Rhododendron,” Best New Poets 2021, Guest Ed. Kaveh Akbar; Series Ed. Jeb Livingood

“A Former Child Soldier of the Maoist Revolution Seeks Asylum in America,” Indiana Review 43.1, Summer 2021

“No Man’s Land Ghazal,” The Cincinnati Review 18.1, Spring 2021

“I Do Not Know How Anything Gets Here,” Kenyon Review Online, May/June 2021

“The Tea-Maker,” Michigan Quarterly Review 60, Spring 2021

“Heirloom,” New England Review 41.4, Winter 2020

“The Last Beekeeper,” “A Brief History of Hunger,” “In a Time of Revolution,” Shenandoah 70.1, Fall 2020

“A Sky Burial,” The Gettysburg Review 33.1, Fall 2020

“No Rhododendron,” “How to Return to Kathmandu After Five Years in America,” “Sky Burial,” Colorado Review 47.3, Fall/Winter 2020

“Nomad,” “Luciferin,” Gulf Coast Online Exclusives 33.1, Fall 2020

“Harvest of the Revolution,” “April in Salt Lake City,” West Branch 93, Spring/Summer 2020

“Ama,” “When the Crow Stopped Singing,” Hayden’s Ferry Review 66, Spring/Summer 2020 

“Lachryphagus,” TriQuarterly 158, Summer/Fall 2020

“Some Hands Are There,” The Missouri Review, Poem of the Week, 26 May 2020

“King Vulture,” “Riflesong of a Dalit Comrade,” “In the Year of the Earth,” “A Small Talk,” Blackbird 19.1, Spring 

2020 

“Operation Rhododendron,” The Cincinnati Review 16.2, Fall 2019

“Anniversary,” “Bride of the Revolution,” “Crossing the Kausiki,” Waxwing 17, Spring 2019