Hajjar Baban

About Hajjar Baban

Hajjar Baban is an Afghan Kurdish poet, educator, and editor who was born in Pakistan and immigrated to the United States with her parents. Hajjar’s mother had sought refuge in Pakistan from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, where she was born, and Hajjar’s father had escaped persecution in Pakistan as a Kurd in Iran. Having arrived in the United States with no real community, Hajjar and her siblings grew up in Dearborn, Michigan. In high school, through a Google search of poetry slam events in the area, she began writing with InsideOut, a Detroit literary arts program. She later served as the 2017 Detroit Youth Poet Laureate.

She attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison through the First Wave Scholarship Program, the first and only full-tuition scholarship for urban arts, where she majored in English and creative writing. She also studied Persian, Arabic, and Pashto in an effort to usher in more possibilities for her writing. Hajjar has received both university awards and those from literary magazines, including the Charles M. Hart Jr. Writers of Promise Award, George B. Hill Poetry Award, the Ron Wallace Poetry Thesis Prize, the Gearhart Poetry Prize, and the Matt Clark Editors’ Choice Prize. In addition, during her time at UW-Madison, Hajjar published two chapbooks, Relative to Blood and What I Know of the Mountains. Her work has since appeared in Poetry Daily, Mizna, and Pleiades, among others. She is a Pushcart Prize winning poet.

Hajjar is a recent graduate of the University of Virginia where she obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry. She currently reads poetry for Muzzle Magazine and is working on a first book of poems.