HUM ہم

Introducing my debut poetry collection.

Dear Friends,

I sit at a precipice of myself, legs dangling. I am thinking about my childhood desk, the fuchsia and gold curtains beside it, Diwali firecrackers bursting behind them while I tried to record a video performing my poem for a spoken word contest on Tumblr. It was my first attempt at spoken word, and I remember winning, though I don’t remember the prize or the poem.

Today’s win, 15 years later, is a sound that travels its bright path through a sky that joins me to the high school kid I once was, believing so hard in beauty.

Sitting in this new thought, this first book thought—sunlight on the sound of a page turning—I return to the lines of Agha Shahid Ali:

The world is full of paper. I am sitting with the beautiful questions of how best to wrap these poems for your hands. I am so thrilled to say my debut poetry collection, HUMہم won the Backwaters Prize in Poetry and will be published with the University of Nebraska Press in October, 2026. The contest was Judged by Maggie Smith, a poet I have revered for as long as I’ve known her work. These are her kind words:

“Daring, inventive, and deeply human, HUMہم helped restore my faith in what imagination and language can do, even as those in power work to corrode both. This is a book I needed to read by a poet I feel fortunate to be living alongside.”

The word hum in Urdu, can mean both ‘we’ and ‘I’. In English, a gesture of sound. I sit down to write and stand up to speak from the voice of the many people I have been, and from our collective sense of I.

Sitting at my childhood desk, that I could translate my pain into beauty meant I was no longer alone—I was with myself. Now, that the beauty of the line could translate someone else’s pain means I am no longer alone—I am among. It is that amongness (a word I first learnt from Taylor Johnson) with which I lean on the word hum, with which I sit down to write and stand up to speak.

Today, I turn in my first complete draft of my manuscript to the editors at the University of Nebraska Press, exactly one year ahead of the book’s release. Given that HUMہم is my debut poetry collection, the business of publishing and launching a book feels obscure, unknown, daunting. As the next several months unfold, I’m going to try to share that journey on here in the hopes of making the process more transparent, and of being accompanied through the dark of it. It is my understanding that books written are prayers spoken. Books that reach their readers are prayers answered.

Thank you for being here. I hope you will journey with me down the roads that follow.

Here’s the full announcement from the press.

Until Soon—