Peripheries - Pandeya, Sophia Ali

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Biographie:
Sophia Pandeya is an in-between, an inhabitant of hyphen. A South Asian-American poet whose ancestry lies in India, she was born on the other side of an artificial border trumped up from identity politics and the entrails of empire. Ever since, she has been obsessed with dismantling the concept of otherness into one big yarn. Her writing dwells in the liminal, engaging with borders that are linguistic, cultural, religious, temporal, personal, geographical and metaphysical. She herself crossed quite a few onerous borders before moving to New York in 1989 where she met her husband Raam Pandeya, a former journalist, poet, and adept of an ancient healing known as Kayakalpa, which she has imbibed and practiced for the last two and a half decades. During her time in Manhattan she also garnered critical acclaim for her acting as a deranged immigrant housewife in Bina Sharif's Watchman at the Theater For The New City, before moving to California where she currently resides with her husband and son. Her poetry has been published in the print anthologies, Cactus Heart, Askew Poetry, Bank Heavy Press and Spilled Ink as well in a number of online journals including Poetry International, The Adirondack Review, BlazeVOX, The Daily O, Lantern Journal, Antiphon Poetry Magazine, AAJ, Convergence Journal AntiSerious and Full Of Crow. Peripheries is her debut collection of poetry. I conceive of my poetry as an aerial root, carrying with it the depth and historicity that rootedness brings while being antenna-like in its awareness of the now, the ebb and flow of our inner and outer ecologies. Working with all of these elements to shape a distinct voice is my core alchemical process. I work from disparate sources constantly refining, choosing, juxtaposing and bending the raw metal of language to yield a nugget of surprise from the familiar.