Sheema Kalbasi
Sheema Kalbasi is an Iranian-Danish-American multi- genre writer, Pushcart Prize-winning poet, recipient of a United Nations humanitarian award, and grantee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands.
Her books include Jahan Malek Khatun: The Princess Poet of Fourteenth-Century Persia; the chapbook The War Took Our Names, selected for the Allison Joseph Series; Spoon and Shrapnel; and Echoes in Exile, featured on Stony Brook University's Women and Gender Studies reading list. She is also the editor and translator of The Poetry of Iranian Women, and Seven Valleys of Love: A Bilingual Anthology of Women Poets from Medieval Persia to Present-Day Iran.
Her work has has been featured by PEN America, Writer's Digest, and PBS. Her poetry has also inspired musical compositions, visual art, short films, and performances at institutions including the Smithsonian National Museum, the United Nations World Food Programme, the Canadian Parliament, and the Tribute World Trade Center.
Pre-Order Winner of the Rich Campbell Chapbook Prize
Publication Date: Oct. 20, 2026
Wings Stronger Than Any Fear
In these poems, childhood unfolds beneath trembling ceilings and skies fractured by bombs, while the sea becomes both refuge and witness. The poems move through the landscape of a childhood shaped by war, but they are also poems of transformation. They ask what remains when the familiar world has been shattered, what can be carried forward, and whether something fragile can still find its way back to the surface.
Wings Stronger Than Any Fear is a meditation on memory and resilience, and on the quiet, astonishing ways we continue to rise, despite everything.