S. J. Ghaus is a Pakistani American writer, organizer, and community gardener. Bay Area-raised with a brief stint in Ohio, they are back in the Midwest as an MFA candidate at Indiana University, where they also served as Poetry Editor of the Indiana Review. They are a VONA/Voices of Our Nation Fellow, Tin House Workshop alum, and the recipient of the 2020 Vera Meyer Strube Academy of American Poets Award. Their work is published or forthcoming in poets.org, Poetry Daily, NPR, Hayden’s Ferry, and elsewhere.
S.J. will be working on a lyric memoir exploring the confluence of land, myth, and queerness, that, alongside their family histories of migration and complicity in state violence, complicate their ability to belong in any of the places they call home. Part essay, part love letter to their mother, the memoir dives into the oceanic between-spaces of belonging across the United States and Pakistan, attempting to learn a decolonial language of home and recovering the vast love that exists in the dream of repair.