Minal Hajratwala

Minal Hajratwala Poems

Minal Hajratwala Biography

Minal Hajratwala (born 1971) is a writer, performer, poet, and queer activist of Indian descent. She was born in 1971 in San Francisco, California, US, and was raised in New Zealand and suburban Michigan. She is a graduate of Stanford University. She is the author of Leaving India: My Family’s Journey From Five Villages to Five Continents (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), which Alice Walker has called "incomparable," and The Washington Post has characterized as "searingly honest." She researched and wrote the book during a seven-year period, traveling the world to interview more than 75 members of her extended family. Hajratwala's creative work has appeared in journals, anthologies, and theater spaces and has received recognition and support from the Sundance Institute, the Jon Sims Center for the Arts, the SerpentSource Foundation, and the Hedgebrook writing retreat for women, where she serves on the Alumnae Leadership Council. For World AIDS Day in 1999, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco commissioned her one-woman show, “Avatars: Gods for a New Millennium.” She previously worked as a journalist at the San Jose Mercury News for eight years, was a board member of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, and was a National Arts Journalism Program fellow at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2000-01. In June 2011 Hajratwala and Tom MacMaster, creator of Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari, engaged in an online dispute over the posting of MacMaster's manuscript.)

The Best Poem Of Minal Hajratwala

Operation Unicorn: Field Report

The unicorns are a technology
we cannot yet approximate.

Each silv'ry filament's
worth a trillion fiber optics—

sensitive, intelligent, dense
with data, light as pi.

The natives name them rainbow-made
rapid-streaming over four-dimensional landscapes

wet with dawn. We observe
dappled midnight & moonlight,

sterling-indigo ripples
of energy, some silk

our instruments cannot yet measure.
They say from time to time a virgin

finds a gemstone tooth, a hoof of sapphire.
Upon inquiry, however, no such objects could be produced.

One operative following a lead
has disappeared, sending

two chaste missives in six months
scratched in bark:

1. The years are arbitrary scrawls
2. I have conquered the subterranean stairs

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