poet . teacher . mother
Atia Sattar is a Pakistani-American poet, teacher and scholar whose creative work has been supported by PEN America, Anaphora Arts, the Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow, and Hypatia in the Woods. She is an alum of the PEN America Emerging Writers Workshop, Juniper Summer Institute, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize (2023), Atia’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in Rogue Agent, West Trade Review, Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, SWWIM Every Day, and Cathexis Northwest Press. Atia’s personal and academic essays also appear in Lion’s Roar, Tricycle, Academe, and the Cambridge Quarterly for Health Care Ethics, among others. In 2025, she was selected as a cohort member for the Sundress Publications reading series Poets in Pajamas. Her edited academic volume, How to Decolonize the Feminist and Queer Studies Classroom is forthcoming from np: press in 2026. She is Associate Teaching Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California.
My writing explores the embodied intersections of grief, gender, race, and motherhood. It offers me a way to articulate what it means to lose a parent, to be a racialized immigrant body, to mother brown children, and to care for myself through a reclamation of heritage, religion, culture, and language in an often hostile political environment.
Writing
Teaching
As I teacher, I aim to practice what I can best describe as a mindfulness-based decolonial pedagogy that focuses on BIPOC approaches, community building and collective care in the classroom, creative thinking and writing, and embodied epistemologies.
Marmo Gallery, Shelton WA, Thursday April 10, 2025
Sundress Press, Poets in Pajamas, Zoom reading series, August 17, 2025 (forthcoming)
Festival Beverly Hills, PEN America Emerging Voices reading, July 21, 2024
Sundress Publications off-site reading, AWP Conference, March 2024
