Pooja Nansi (b. 1981)
BIOGRAPHY
Pooja Nansi is a poet and educator who believes in the power that performance can lend to the written word. She has published three collections of poetry; Stiletto Scars (2007), Love is An Empty Barstool (2013) and We Make Spaces Divine (2021) . She also co-edited SingPoWriMo: The Anthology (2014), and co-authored Local Anaesthetic: a Painless Approach to Singaporean Poetry (2014), a teacher’s resource for Singaporean poetry. She has over 15 years of experience in secondary and higher tertiary education across Literature and Creative Writing.
Her key performance work includes her recurring one woman show, You Are Here which explores issues of migration through personal family histories. It opened in Singapore in 2015 and has since seen five iterations and toured to Australia. She also wrote and performed Thick Beats for Good Girls with Checkpoint Theatre which opened in April 2018 and explored the intersections between feminism, identity and Hip Hop.
From April 2013 to February 2018, she curated a monthly spoken word and poetry event called Speakeasy at Artistry, which has showcased both emerging and established poets from places as diverse as Burma and Botswana. In December 2018, she co-founded the minority voices festival Other Tongues as a Youth Poet Ambassador Public Programme. She served as festival director of the Singapore Writers Festival from 2019-2023. Her tenure has been referred to as transforming the pinnacle event for local writers and readers to buck trends of aging audiences worldwide and be more all-encompassing and inclusive.
She was also a recipient of the Young Artist Award in 2016, Singapore’s highest accolade for Arts practitioners below the age of 35 as well as Singapore’s inaugural Youth Poet Ambassador. In 2024, she was conferred the Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, one of France’s top cultural honors. She currently teaches Creative Writing at Nanyang Technological University and serves as Chief Publisher of AFTERIMAGE, the poetry publishing arm of Sing Lit Station.
Author Photo © Shawn Paul Tan. Author Biography © Pooja Nansi. All rights reserved.
