Anuradha Bhowmik has won the 2021 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for her collection Brown Girl Chromatography. The prize has a cash award of $5,000 and publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press as part of the Pitt Poetry Series. Brown Girl Chromatography will be published this coming September.
Organizers said that Brown Girl Chromatography is "shaped by Bhowmik's life as a Bangladeshi-born American girl and woman growing up as a first-generation immigrant in the United States. The collection interrogates issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality in post-9/11 America while navigating Bhowmik's millennial childhood, adolescence, and adulthood."
Bhowmik is a 2022 Kundiman Fellow and a 2018 AWP Intro Journals Project Winner in Poetry, and earned an MFA from Virginia Tech. She has received awards from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Community of Writers, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Frost Place, the Indiana University Writers' Conference, the Eckerd College Writers' Conference, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, among others. Her poetry and prose have appeared in POETRY, Hayden's Ferry Review, diode poetry journal, the Sun, DIAGRAM, Indiana Review, New South, Quarterly West, Salt Hill, Nashville Review, Crab Orchard Review, Slice Magazine, Zone 3, the Normal School, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere.