About

Hajjar Baban is the author of LOW FLYING PLANES, winner of the 2025 National Poetry Series, selected by Jake Skeets for Milkweed Editions (2026) and the chapbook What I Know of the Mountains (Anhinga Press, 2019), winner of the 2018 Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize. A Pakistan-born Afghan Kurdish poet, she is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin - Madison where she was a member of the First Wave Scholarship Program. A 2021 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow, she is a recent graduate of an MFA in Poetry at the University of Virginia. A Pushcart Prize winning poet, Baban served as the 2017 Detroit Youth Poet Laureate and has received or placed in the Charles M. Hart Jr. Writers of Promise Award, George B. Hill Poetry Award, the Ron Wallace Poetry Thesis Prize, The Gearhart Poetry Prize, the Matt Clark Editors' Choice Prize in poetry, and the Hayden Ferry’s Review Poetry Contest. Baban reads poetry for Muzzle Magazine, is an editor for Half Mystic, and has work appearing in Guernica, Pleiades, and Poetry Daily, among others and has recently received writing support from Community of Writers Workshop and Tin House Summer Workshop. She spends most of her time avoiding running from herself.