Tarfia Faizullah is an American poet. She won a 2009 Cohen Award.[1] Her book, Seam won the 2014 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Awards.[2]

The poems in this captivating collection weave beauty with violence, the personal with the historic as they recount the harrowing experiences of the two hundred thousand female victims of rape and torture at the hands of the Pakistani army during the 1971 Liberation War. As the child of Bangladeshi immigrants, the poet in turn explores her own losses, as well as the complexities of bearing witness to the atrocities these war heroines endured.

Throughout the volume, the narrator endeavors to bridge generational and cultural gaps even as the victims recount the horror of grief and personal loss. As we read, we discover the profound yet fragile seam that unites the fields, rivers, and prisons of the 1971 war with the poet’s modern-day hotel, or the tragic death of a loved one with the holocaust of a nation.

Moving from West Texas to Dubai, from Virginia to remote villages in Bangladesh and back again, the narrator calls on the legacies of Willa Cather, César Vallejo, Tomas Tranströmer, and Paul Celan to give voice to the voiceless. Fierce yet loving, devastating and magical at once, Seam is a testament to the lingering potency of memory and the bravery of a nation’s victims.

Winner, Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) New Writers Award 2014

The Bangladesh Liberation War[a] (Bengali: মুক্তিযুদ্ধ Muktijuddho), also known as the Bangladesh War of Independence, or simply the Liberation War in Bangladesh, was a military conflict between East Pakistan (later joined by India) and West Pakistan in 1971 which established the Bangladeshi republic. The war began on 25 March 1971, when the Pakistani military junta led by General Yahya Khan began a military operation against Bengali nationalists, civilians, students, intelligentsia, religious minorities and armed personnel, who were demanding self-determination and acceptance of the 1970 election results. The junta arrested Prime Minister-elect Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and banned major political parties and newspapers in East Pakistan; it brought the region under West Pakistani-dominated martial law authority.