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 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 and project director with Bay Area Creative. She is the current Poet Laureate of San Ramon on occupied Ohlone land, where she lives with her dog, Apollo.
“Using form as a boat to wade through the aftermath of abuse, Jaz Sufi has written a brief and miraculous collection of poems that I can only imagine will be a companion and inspiration to anyone who has survived similar storms, and a window into what surviving that chaos looks like for others. While the subject matter for these poems might injure and heal the heart in due turn, it also must be stated: this poet can write their ass off. Sufi brings the rigor, skill, vision necessary to peer into some of life’s darkest chapters and emerge with so much light to beat back the shadows.”
— Danez Smith
“Jaz Sufi’s Catalog of Shadows gripped me, broke me, mended me whole. In these meticulously wrought, exquisite poems, intimate partner violence transfigures into a jewel in the hands of a master craftsman considering every facet, every glint, every nick. Sufi resists the familiar survivor’s narrative in favor of refreshing emotional authenticity as her poems interrogate not only abuse but also the negotiations one makes while unable to say that “A word” out loud. Catalog of Shadows is, ultimately, a reclamation of voice. Survival made manifest. A tender yet fierce, self-recriminating yet unapologetic testimony of the highest order.”
— Eugenia Leigh
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
“Ghazal for the A Word” in swamp pink (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)
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
Verses & Voices at the San Ramon Library
in-person every Wednesday at 5:30pm PST
upcoming classes
Salt, Silk, Silt & Slit: The Poetics of Desire and Eroticism
October 6 - November 3
Tuesdays, 6:30–9:30 PM (ET)
past classes
A Little Class on Form
Writing Our Obsessions
The Poetics of Trauma
The Self & Self-Love as Subject
Unquiet Minds: Writing Mental Illness, Madness, & Neurodivergency