Ladan Osman

Bio: Ladan Osman is a Somali-born poet and essayist who now lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of Exiles of Eden (2019), a work of poetry, photos, and experimental text; The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (2015), winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize; and the chapbook Ordinary Heaven, which appeared in the boxed set Seven New Generation African Poets (2014). Her writing is a lyric and exegetic response to problems of race, gender, displacement, and colonialism. She examines existence in roles where imagination around female ability is limited, in the many spaces where women are so often denied automatic credibility and their logic is assumed fallible. Much of her writing is concerned with the question of testimony: Whose testimony is valid? Whose testimony is worth recording? Her essay “On Not Writing” is a provocative testament to her experiences and dual identity.  Osman has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem, the Luminarts Foundation, and the Michener Center for Writers, among others. Her work has appeared in numerous publications and has been translated into more than 10 languages. Osman’s writing and photographs have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Roar, Rumpus, Transition, and the Washington Square Review. She is a contributing culture editor at the Blueshift Journal.

Events: Boundless: Africa