Pireeni Sundaralingam

"Burning through boundaries of global geography, Pireeni's voice casts a vital light on colonialism's enduring shadows in South Asia. "Home" is one of her destinations - homelessness, another. Whether in London, America, or elsewhere in the diaspora, Pireeni's poetry explores the ethereal alienation of the post-colonial world. Her work is literature that ignites the soul: politicized, profound, and hauntingly poetic."

~ Shilpa Agarwal
Chair of Literature
ArtWallah - The International Arts Festival of the South Asian Diaspora

 

NEWS: April 2011

  • Pireeni will be visiting adjunct Assoc. Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies, teaching a graduate course on The Neuroscience of Poetry.

    NEWS: March 2011

  • Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry, co-edited by Pireeni, wins the 2011 N. California Book Award

  • Pireeni receives Berlin Universität der Künste fellowship in Interdisciplinary Thought


    NEWS: January 2011

  • The January 2011 issue of World Literature Today, guest edited by Pireeni Sundaralingam, listens in on The Crosstalk between Science and Literature, with a fascinating lineup of ten contributors:

    1. Physicist Alan Lightman and philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein discuss how they devise “emotional experiments” in their fiction in order to probe the limits of rational thought.
    2. In a provocative essay, poet and cognitive scientist Pireeni Sundaralingam asks, Are science and poetry inherently at odds with each other?
    3. Authors Suzanne Lummis, Philip Metres, Vincenzo Della Mea, and Tone Hødnebø conduct playful experiments in new poems tied to the issue’s theme.
    4. Berlin-based architect Eric Ellingsen co-opts the repeating structure of the poetic villanelle to remap space and to explore how literature might inform urban design.
    5. Welsh poet-physician Dannie Abse traces the intersections of poetry and medicine in his own life and work.
    6. Playwright Kenneth Lin discusses theater’s ability to convey the grandeur of scientific discovery.
    		•



    NEWS SEPT 2010:

    Pireeni is Resident Artist at the De Young Fine Arts Museum. Her poems and poetry-art installations will be on display throughout the month, at the museum's Kimball Gallery and you can catch up with her in person at one of the following two events:
    • Saturday, September 18, 3:00 pm: Lecture by Pireeni Sundaralingam. Brain, Perception, and Creativity
    • Friday, September 24, 6-8:30 pm: Artist reception - performance by Pireeni Sundaralingam & Colm Ó Riain. With light refreshments.

    For more information see the De Young Museum website.

  • WORLD LITERATURE TODAY features an extensive interview with Pireeni in their special issue on "Migration & Exile".

  • The latest issue of CATAMARAN (the Journal of South Asian American Studies) includes an interview with Pireeni, an extract of her play "War Harvest" and her poem "Sri Lankan Cemetery".

  • Pireeni has been named one of America's Emerging Writers by Ploughshares journal.

    Born in Sri Lanka and educated at Oxford, Pireeni currently lives in San Francisco. The poems in her forthcoming first collection (Margin Lands) move from fragmented personal memories of 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 shadow of other wars and wastelands.

    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.
    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.