Two Assamese Poets Named Finalists for Top American Poetry Prize: Shlagha Borah & Abhijit Sarmah

The Poetry Foundation, one of the most prestigious organizations in the United States for the promotion of poetry, has named their list of Fellows for 2024, and two Assamese poets are named as finalists: Shlagha Borah, a poet from Guwahati and Abhijit Sharma, from Dibrugarh. 2024 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellows are Rob Macaisa Colgate, Marissa Davis, Hermelinda Hernandez Monjaras, Chandanie Somwaru, and marion eames white.

Shlagha Borah was born in Assam, India. She earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is an editorial assistant at The Ong. Her work has been published in The Cincinnati Review, Salamander, Nashville Review, The Florida Review, South Dakota Review, and other outlets.

She is the finalist of a 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and has received support from Brooklyn Poets, Sundress Academy for the
Arts, the Hambidge Center, the Peter Bullough Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She cofounded Pink Freud, a student-led collective working toward making mental health services accessible in India.

Abhijit Sarmah is a poet from the northeastern Indian state of Assam and a researcher of global Indigenous writing. Sarmah earned a master of philosophy degree from Dibrugarh University, India, and is a PhD student at the University of Georgia, where he received a 2022 Arts Lab Graduate Fellowship and a 2024 Ruth Pack Scholarship oered by the Institute of Native American Studies. His work is published in Poetry, The Margins, Lunch Ticket, Glassworks magazine, Porter House Review, The Lincoln Review, and other outlets. Sarmah was twice selected as a finalist for a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship in 2023 and 2024.

Since 1989, the Poetry Foundation has awarded fellowships to outstanding young poets in recognition of their current and potential future contributions to the field. The $27,000 prize makes the fellowships among the largest awards available to young poets in the United States. Each fellow receives a subscription and an invitation to publish in Poetry magazine. Additionally, the Poetry Foundation will sponsor their attendance at the Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, New Jersey, where they’ll
participate in a public reading on October 19, 2024.

More and more writers from Assam, India, have recently found careers in the United States. 2020 saw the debut of award-winning Assamese-American writer Reema Rajbanshi, published by Red Hen Press in California. Rajbanshi, a professor of English and Creative Writing in Philadelphia, belongs to the Assamese community, and her fiction explores the experience of Assamese Americans. At the Harvard University, Rubul Mout, a scientist from Kakopathar, Assam, wrote a memoir about belonging in America, a bestseller in Assam. Assamese novelist Dipak Kumar Borkakoty’s novel Udhabhashito Upokol won the National Endowments for the Arts in 2023, one of the most respected fellowships in the United States. This shows the growing interest in literature from Assam and Northeast India on the global stage and suggests that people worldwide are interested in reading stories from Assam and Northeast India.