gowri k.

Gowri K.

I am a queer Eelam Tamil writer, performing artist, teacher, and lawyer whose family immigrated to the U.S. from Sri Lanka. My advocacy has addressed animal welfare, the environment, the rights of prisoners and the criminally accused in the U.S., and justice and accountability in Sri Lanka. I am a Kundiman fellow, a copy editor for The Abolitionist Newspaper, a senior legal officer at PEARL, and Literary Arts Programs Director at Split This Rock. Previously, I served as poetry coordinator at BloomBars, senior poetry editor at Jaggery, and co-editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly. You can find me on Twitter and Instagram @gowrimozhi.

I have performed my work at Lincoln Center Out of Doors, the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage, Capital Fringe Festival, Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Asian American Literature Festival, SpokenWord Paris, and universities in the U.S. and Canada. At the 2014 Atlas Intersections Festival, I produced and performed in “Yasmeen,” an original work co-written and co-produced by Huda Asfour, a Palestinian composer and musician. In 2021, I received the Nella Larsen Memorial Scholarship from the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference and a Tanne Foundation Award.

My publication credits appear below.

POETRY & HYBRID CREATIVE WORK
* “How do you take your impunity?” (Adi Magazine, February 2021)
* “The Preferred Terms Are Mine” (Journal of Asian American Studies and The Margins, February 2021)
* Three poems (“Turn on push notifications,” “Sedimentary rocks,” and “Nxrrative”) in Beltway Poetry Quarterly’s 20th Anniversary Issue (September 2019)
* “A Message of the Emergency Broadcasting System” about the Tamil genocide in Sri Lanka (May 2019)
* “What questions will be asked,” commissioned by 18 Million Rising for its #NoMuslimBanEver micropoem series (June 2018)
* Poetic translation contributed to Catalina Ouyang’s [Conclusion and Findings] (January 2018)
* “How To Enjoy Your Vacation To A Country That Says It Won The War” named the most read poem of 2016 in Split This Rock’s The Quarry (December 2016)
* “Footprints” for the Hope Spoken Broken project in conjunction with artists in Jabalia Refugee Camp, Palestine (March 2014)

NON-FICTION
* “The public health impacts of concentrated animal feeding operations on local communities,” co-authored with Michael Greger (Family & Community Health, 2010)
* “Global Farm Animal Production and Global Warming: Impacting and Mitigating Climate Change,” co-authored with Danielle Nierenberg (Environmental Health Perspectives, 2008)

INTERVIEWS & REVIEWS ABOUT MY WORK
* Interview for South Asian Memory Work (March 2021)
* Interview on American Desis Podcast (September 2016)
* Interview by Ruben Quesada (Queen Mob’s Tea House, March 2016)
* Review of “Mortal Tongues, Immortal Stories” (The Washington Post, February 2016)

INTERVIEWS I’VE CONDUCTED
* Interview of M.I.A. at the NYC premiere of her documentary at IFC Center (September 2018)
* Interview of Hieu Minh Nguyen and R.O. Kwon at Library of Congress (September 2018)
* Interview of Kaveh Akbar and Kazim Ali at Folger Shakespeare Library (May 2018)
* Interview of Tamil poet R. Cheran (The Alignist, December 2015)

For information about speaking engagements, workshops, or performances, please contact me at circlesaroundus@gmail.com.

Gowri K- photo by Fid Thompson