Excerpt from
“A Homeland, A Woman”
by Mahbouba Ibrahimi

Mahbouba Ibrahimi was born in Kandahar, Afghanistan in 1977. Her family moved to Iran in the wake of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan when she was only two years old. She joined the Pearl of Dari (Anjoman-e Dorr-e Dari), a literary association for Persian speaking Afghan poets in exile. Ibrahimi rose to prominence as a distinguished young Afghan woman poet in the city of Mashhad before moving to Tehran. She immigrated to Sweden in 2011, where she currently works in the city of Uppsala as a Persian language instructor and translator. Ibrahimi has published three poetry collections, Winds Are My Sisters (Tehran, 1990), Majnun, Layli, and the Children (Kabul, 2017), and You Look at My Mouth in the Mirror (Kabul, 2021). She is regarded as one of the leading voices of modern poetry of Afghanistan and mostly writes in free verse style (she’r-e sepid) about womanhood, patriarchy, and exilic identity. Her poems have been so far translated into English and Swedish.

Fatemeh Shams is the author of two books of poetry in Persian, the first of which won the Jaleh Esfahani Award for the best young Iranian poet in 2012, and a critical monograph in English on poetry and politics, A Revolution in Rhyme (Oxford UP). When They Broke Down the Door (Mage), a collection of her poems translated by Dick Davis, won the 2016 Latifeh Yarshater Award from the Association for Iranian Studies. Her poetry has been featured in the Poetry Foundation website, PBS NewsHour, and the Penguin Book of Feminist Writing, among other venues. She is currently assistant professor of Modern Persian Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Follow her on Twitter @shazzshams.