jaz sufi is a writer & educator.

but who is jaz sufi?

Jaz Sufi (she/her) is a queer Iranian-American poet and arts educator. She is a National Poetry Slam finalist and the former executive director of the Berkeley Slam, the longest running poetry slam on the West Coast. She has toured internationally, from Berlin and London to performing alongside the Townsend Opera. Her work has been published or is upcoming in Best New Poets, Best of the Net, AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Muzzle, and elsewhere, and her debut chapbook Catalog of Shadows is forthcoming from Game Over Books. She has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Watering Hole, and New York University, where she received her MFA as a Goldwater fellow. She has taught in K-12 and college classrooms across the country, and works as a teaching artist with Bay Area Creative. She is the current Poet Laureate of San Ramon on occupied Ohlone land, where she lives with her dog, Apollo.

so where are the poems?

 

selected online

“My Mother and the Bottle” in The Offing (2017)
“Etymology of Improvised Explosives” in Birdfeast (2019)
“Hanjo” in Yalobusha Review and winner of the 2020 Yellowwood Poetry Prize (2020)
"When My Classmates Ask Me If My Father Took Down the Towers” in Southeast Review (2021) and selected for Best of the Net 2022
“today i manic all the way down” in Sixth Finch (2022)
“Catalog of Shadows Cast in Different Kinds of Light” in The Adroit Journal (2024)
“Magic Trick” in The Cortland Review (2024) and selected for Best New Poets 2024
“Etymology of Borders” in Split This Rock (2025)
“Ode to My Lover’s Sequined Dress” in Glass: A Journal of Poetry (2025) and selected for Verse Daily
“How Do You Say” forthcoming in BOOTH (2025)

selected print

“I'm Fine, Thank You for Asking! I'm Fine, Thank You for Asking!” in The Journal (2017)
“Every Part of the Animal” in AGNI (2020)
“Poem in the Voice of Thirty to Fifty Feral Hogs” in Black Warrior Review (2023)
“Understand I Can No Longer” in The Colorado Review (2023)
“Anti-Epithalamion” in The Georgia Review (2024) and selected for Poetry Daily
“Duplex” in Hayden’s Ferry Review (2025)
“Ghazal for the A Word” forthcoming in swamp pink (2025)

other

“DSM 5-296.89” in I Wish I Wasn’t Royalty, a playable chapbook/deck of cards
“Ode to My Lover’s Sequined Dress” in Queer Poem-A-Day

what about the workshops?

free & ongoing

upcoming classes

past classes

  • A Little Class on Form

  • Writing Our Obsessions

  • The Poetics of Trauma

  • The Self & Self-Love as Subject

what’s on your mind?