Dilruba Ahmed

The Writing Lab - Dilruba Ahmed

Dilruba (Ruba) Ahmed is the author of Bring Now the Angels (Pitt Poetry Series), with poems featured in New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, and Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama.  Her debut book of poetry, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press), won the Bakeless Prize.  Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, & Virginia Quarterly Review.  Her poems have also been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2019 (Scribner);  Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books); New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims (Red Hen Press); They Rise Like A Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak Press); Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf); Literature: The Human Experience (Bedford/St. Martin’s); and elsewhere.  

Ahmed is the recipient of The Florida Review’s Editors’ Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. In Fall 2023, she served as the Blanche Armfield Poet in the Creative Writing Program at UNC-Chapel Hill. In Spring 2024, she was the featured writer at the 26th annual Literary Festival at Penn State-Brandywine.

Ahmed holds B.Phil and M.A.T. degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers.  A former project manager with The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Ahmed has taught with Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers, Chatham University’s MFA Program, Bryn Mawr College, Hugo House in Seattle, and workshops across the U.S.  She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of creative writing at Swarthmore College.