Rooja Mohassessy Presents 2 Poems from When Your Sky Runs Into Mine

15 September, 2024

When Your Sky Runs Into Mine is the winner of the 22nd Annual Elixir Press Poetry Award.  Notes Shara McCallum, “Rooja Mohassessy’s debut collection belies any notion of a first book. It is a work of expansive vision and formal achievement, sounding an assured and unforgettable voice in poetry. Ekphrasis is at the core of Mohassessy’s poetics, resplendent in her responses to works of visual art and in the richly textured images she creates with intricate diction and syntax.”

 

Rooja Mohassessy


This red collage is the inspiration for "Spared": Bahman Mohassess. Untitled, 2010. Assemblage.
This red collage is the inspiration for “Spared”: Bahman Mohassess. Untitled, 2010. Assemblage.

Bahman Mohassess. Danaë, 1978. Oil on Canvas.
Bahman Mohassess. Danaë, 1978. Oil on Canvas.

Rooja Mohassessy is an Iranian-born poet and educator. She is a MacDowell Fellow and an MFA graduate of Pacific University, Oregon. Her ekphrastic debut collection When Your Sky Runs Into Mine (Feb 2023) was the winner of the 22nd Annual Elixir Poetry Award. Rooja and her work have been featured on NPR, The Hive Poetry Collective, and The Slowdown. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Poet Lore, RHINO Poetry, Nimrod, Southern Humanities Review, CALYX Journal, Ninth LetterCream City Review, The Adroit JournalNew LettersThe Florida Review, Poetry Northwest, The Pinch, The Rumpus, The Journal, and elsewhere. Her work is also anthologized in California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, and Colossus: Body, a compilation of writings by Californians writing on the themes of bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. Rooja is an editorial assistant at the journal Prairie Schooner.

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