New Release by Sheema Kalbasi

An outstanding and honest voice from the Middle East, Sheema Kalbasi (born November 20, 1972, in Tehran, Iran) is a human right activist, an award winning poet, and literary translator. She is the director of Dialogue of Nations through Poetry in Translation, director of Poetry of Iranian Women Project, the poetry editor of Muse Apprentice Guild and the co-director of the Other Voices International project. She has authored two collections of poems, Echoes in Exile in English, and Sangsar (stoning) in Persian. Kalbasi's work has appeared in numerous magazines, literary reviews, anthologies, and has been translated into several languages. She is one of the few literary figures to promote poets of Iranian heritage as well as international poets into an English speaking audience. Furthermore she has created the horizontal and vertical, a new style in poetry. A frequent and outspoken person, Kalbasi's work is distinguished by her passionate defense of the ethnic and religious minorities' rights.

She has worked for the United Nations and the Center for non Afghan Refugees in Pakistan, and in Denmark. Today she lives with her husband and daughter in the United States.

The book can be ordered at Amazon.com

to learn more please go to its website at http://www.echoesinexile.com/

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Kalbasi’s poetry is generous and abundantly human, passionate and compassionate.

-- Jimmy Santiago Baca, award winning poet, and author of Immigrants in Our Own Land

Sheema Kalbasi’s poems speak of love, loss, and life in exile. They are the poems of a human rights activist passionate with the hope of peace. Kalbasi’s poetry exposes the deep heart of a woman who is compassionate with suffering and full of the joy of life, of the innocence of a child, the knowledge of a woman, the aspirations of a peacemaker. These are stirring poems with a worldly view, both accessible and imaginative. They make an excellent cross-cultural exchange that demonstrates our universal humanity.

-- Daniela Gioseffi, American book award winning author of WOMEN ON WAR: INTERNATIONAL WRITINGS.

Already, this new century seems as deafened by ideological clamour as the last, plagued by residues of cultural and literary separatism sometimes bordering on a kind of 'aesthetic apartheid'. For nations increasingly brought face-to-face across cultural divides - chasms that are now as much internal as external - the need for conversation, on its many levels, has never been more essential. Poetry, with its potential for radical openness and self-revelation, is an ideal prompt and vehicle for that conversation. Many kinds of voice continue to lie dormant in the English-speaking world; but we have at least begun to witness, in more recent times, some breakings of silence. In its quiet, intimate way, 'Echoes in Exile' reverberates with that desire to speak up. Of Iranian descent, Kalbasi is one of a swelling stream of poets now beginning to establish the conversation's many-sidedness.

-- Dr. Mario Petrucci, award winning poet and writer

Sheema Kalbasi’s poems attest to our tragic situation in which exile becomes a privileged position for pointing out the prevalent injustice of displacement. Her deeply engaging and reflective poems allow us to wrest away the very idea of homecoming in a world that denies it.


-- Dr. Peyman Vahabzadeh, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Simon Fraser University