Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif holds degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan's Poetry for the People, and from New York University. Her debut, Look (Graywolf, 2016), was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the 2017 American Book Award. Her second collection, Customs (Graywolf, 2022), followed. She has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Foundation, along with a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. She is an associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
