Biografia
Rajiv Mohabir is an Indo-Caribbean American poet and translator. He is the author of several poetry collections and chapbooks, as well as the memoir Antiman. He is an assistant professor of poetry in the Department of English at the University of Colorado Boulder. == Early life and education == Mohabir was born in London, England. Soon after, his family moved to Toronto, Canada, and then to Chuluota, Florida, United States, where he spent most of his formative years. In Queens, New York, he taught ESL as community empowerment for immigrants. "It was also disheartening to know all the obstacles they had to deal with in order to make something of themselves," he says. "I had been there myself." When he lived in New York, he produced the nationally broadcast radio show KAVIhouse on JusPunjabi. Mohabir is fluent in Hindi, Bhojpuri and a dying language known as Guyanese Hindustani. Mohabir has a BA from the University of Florida in religious studies and an MSEd in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from Long Island University, Brooklyn. Mohabir received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from Queens College, CUNY. He has a PhD in English from the University of Hawai`i. He was formerly an Assistant Professor of Poetry at Auburn University. About his bevy of learned disciplines, Mohabir said in an interview with Kundiman,"I have never thought of these things as disconnected—in fact the music I came to poetry from was religious/cultural. I wonder if it’s the academy that tries to separate them. I see a connection in things poetic as far as my community is concerned. My voice is witness, connecting seemingly disparate 'fields of study.' For me they all happen simultaneously. Religion, language, spirituality, poetry together make my black ink. I can’t disaggregate my own being into constituent parts to say, this is the queer part, this is the spiritual part, this is the materially obsessed part, this is the Caribbean part, this is the Bhojpuri part, this is the Tamilian part…the list goes on forever. To be a queer immigrant of color is to be at one with the paradoxes around you. I choose to write into these paradoxes, to see what kind of tensions emerge." == Poetry == Mohabir is the author of The Taxidermist's Cut, published by Four Way Books in 2016, and The Cowherd's Son, which was the winner of the 2015 Kundiman Poetry Prize and was published by Tupelo Press in 2017. The Rumpus said: "Mohabir's The Taxidermist’s Cut is a collection of destruction and reconstruction, and we the readers are left among the moonlit ruins, with a strange ache of recognition." Publishers Weekly said: "In his excellent debut, Mohabir exposes desire and inner turmoil through the measured incantations of a queer, Indian-American voice that refuses the burdens of a homophobic and racist world." In a starred review for The Cowherd's Son, Publishers Weekly said: "Mohabir continues to demonstrate an uncanny ability to compose exacting, tactile poems that musically leap o
