01.08.06: PIREENI SUNDARALINGAM

Born in Sri Lanka and educated at Oxford, Pireeni Sundaralingam currently lives in San Francisco. Her poetry examines the many-faceted aspects of exile - and of the ways in which community may be found within the situation of exile. The poems in her forthcoming first collection (Margin Lands) move from fragmented personal memories of censorship and genocide in Sri Lanka to universal images of immigration and repatriation in the West. Here are poems about Prague, Croatia, Ireland and Iran, about friends who fled from the shadows of other concentration camps and cruelties.

Pireeni has been invited to read in venues throughout the US and Europe, including Ireland, London's Barbican Theatre and the Left Bank in Paris. Back in California, she has been a featured poet at numerous literary gatherings, including:

* 50th Anniversary of The National Poetry Archives, 2004
* San Francisco Poetry Festival, Yerba Buena Center, 2003
* Los Angeles Times Festival of Books 2003
* Los Angeles Biennial Poetry Festival 2003
* 1st Annual Literature Expo, Oakland, 2003
* Berkeley Poetry Festival 2002
* APAture festival for Asian Pacific American Art, San Francisco, 2002
* "Human Rights Day" at SF State University, 2002
* "The John Steinbeck Centennial celebrations: "The Poetry of Displacement" presented by the California Council for the Humanities, 2002

In August 2002, PEN Oakland invited Pireeni to read her work in lieu of the presidential keynote address at the National Literary Awards ceremony, while in September, Irish poet Pearse Hutchinson paid tribute to Pireeni's work, choosing to read two of her pieces together with his own writing at the opening of the Sligo Poetry Festival in Ireland.

Pireeni's awards include the Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize (for the album "Bridge across the Blue"), a Zellerbach grant (together with the Dhaia Tribe collective) and the Rosenthal Fellowship (awarded by PEN USA). Her work has been published in anthologies and journals throughout England, Ireland and the USA, including Ploughshares and The Progressive. In her spare time, Pireeni is a cognitive scientist.

Listen to Pireeni on The Lit Show (RealMedia Streaming)