For Saba Keramati, M.F.A. ’20, poetry creates a fascinating alternate realm. “You kind of step into the world of poetry with an understanding that you might get taken somewhere different; your language might be challenged, and you might expect to find a lot of beauty,” she said. “My interest in writing poetry has been wanting to live in that mode and sustain a vessel for that experience.”
Keramati won the 2023 92NY Discovery Poetry Prize, a prize recognizing unpublished poets. She then received the 2025 Nossrat Yassini Poetry Award for Self-Mythology, her first published poem collection.
She grew up in the Bay Area and received her M.F.A. in creative writing from ɫɫ.
At ɫɫ, Keramati took an influential children’s literature course that helped her with her poetry. “We focused on a wide historical range of children's origins and a lot of interesting myths,” she said. “That played into my writing because I did some historical digging of different books in my cultures.”
Keramati, who is Chinese-Iranian, said she wants to provide representation for a more uncommon multiracial experience, inspired by her childhood and her parents’ immigration story. “A lot of what I encountered was one parent of color and one white parent,” she said. “A huge motivation for me was to add something that existed beyond that.”
Keramati brought these themes into Self-Mythology, published in March 2024, focusing on the experience of being unable to feel at home in her parents’ countries of origin. “I was really interested in the idea of what it means to constantly be othered and how you can live with that in your body and mind, theorize through it, and physically survive,” she said. Keramati also incorporated influential historical events into her book, like 9/11 and the murder of Vincent Chin, an American of Chinese descent who was killed in a racially motivated assault in 1982. Her book follows a personal narrative arc. “These events speak to the political nature of my identities, focusing on an internal reckoning,” she said.
For her writing process, Keramati compiles thoughts and ideas centered around a specific subject. Then, she laser focuses on completing the poem, doing the entirety of editing and revising in one session. “I sit there for as long as possible. I just get it as good as it can possibly be in that moment,” she said.
Keramati writes on the weekends and after her day job at Prism, a nonprofit movement journalism outlet. She takes days off to attend talks, workshops, and writing residencies across the country. “I've been saying yes to everything that I possibly can,” she said. “I'm hustling right now, but I'm happy to be doing it.”
Moving forward, Keramati said she hopes to incorporate her activism work to push the limits of her writing. “I've never been a person who's necessarily shy about what I believe in, but when I was approaching it in poetry, there was a part of me that wanted to focus on making it beautiful,” she said. “I want to be brave enough where I can rely on the skills and technicalities of my poetry to be able to say something.”