Rafiq Kathwari

Rafiq Kathwari, a recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, earned an MA in political science from the New School and an MFA from Columbia University. His most recent collection of poems, My Mother's Scribe, (Yoda, 2020) is a story told from the point of view of a young boy who sees his mother losing her mind during and after the partition of India.

Kathwari has translated selected poems of Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), the poet-philosopher of South Asia, from the original Urdu; many of those translations have been individually published in journals such as Tin House and Literary Review.

Kathwari divides his time between New York, Dublin, and Kashmir, where he was born a Scorpio at midnight.