Devi S LaskarDevi S. Laskar's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlanta Review, The Squaw Valley Review, The North American Review, Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel, among others. The Raleigh Review nominated "Untitled Western Country Song n Rubescent A Minor" for Meridian's Best New Poets 2016. The Blue Heron Review nominated "Most Days a Passage" for Sundress' Best of the Net Anthology 2016. Poet Jessica Piazza recently selected "Dissection" and "What Namaste Really Means" as the winning entries for the poetry prize at the 27th Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, and those poems are forthcoming in the next issue of Noyo River Review. Ms. Laskar's poetry explores the questions of identity and race and what it means to be in exile in your own country. She writes of the politics of race and gender and not belonging in both the Deep South of the United States where she was born and raised, and in India, where she spent many summers as a child and adolescent visiting her extended family. Ms. Laskar holds an MFA from Columbia University in New York, an MA in South & West Asian Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BA in journalism and English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a former journalist, covering crime and government for newspapers such as The Raleigh News & Observer (NC), The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (GA) and Gannett Company papers, The News-Press (FL) and The Commercial-News (IL) and Honolulu Star-Bulletin (HI). She is also an artist and photographer. Recently, one of her photographs was featured on the cover of The Florida Review, and she has had other photographs published or forthcoming in the pages of Tiferet Journal and The Blue Heron Review. She is an alumna of both TheOpEdProject and VONA/Voices, and is at work on a novel about police violence as it intersects with a lingering climate of social racism. She now lives in California. Read More Read Less