Samyak Shertok
Samyak Shertok’s debut collection, No Rhododendron (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), was selected by Kimiko Hahn for the 2024 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and shortlisted for the 2026 PEN Open Book Award and the 2026 Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize. His poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, POETRY, Shenandoah, Waxwing, and elsewhere. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and the Jake Adam York Prize, he has received fellowships from Aspen Words, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His work has been awarded the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Originally from Nepal, he is an Assistant Professor of English at Mississippi State University.
Reading List
Intimate and Infinite Forms: Toward a Transmigrant Poetics
I wonder what rights the sonnet has. I wonder if the sonnet has more rights than me.
A Brief History of Hunger
The sky snakeroot smoke and rasping—a terrible light swallowed up the village. Up close: monsters of dirt, without number. Their wings sickled and shining: fairies rapacious, red red. They sheathed the cedars and barley fields ash yellow. Soon we could see neither land nor sky. We bolted the doors and windows: the Teeth of the […]
In a Time of Revolution
Never wear red. Never wear GoldStar shoes. Bury the batteries beneath the persimmon tree. When someone asks you where you live, point at the neighbor’s house. At the checkpoint when they ask you where you’re coming from, say Home. After soccer, when the goalie says I wish the King were dead! don’t join the chorus […]
The Last Beekeeper
Let it be said Ama was the last Himalayan beekeeper. When she harvested honey barehanded in the stone house we lived in, she took not juniper smoke but song to the hive. A home is one flower and a thousand stings. The bees flew into her oiled black hair and when she combed it, down […]