Shabnam Piryaei  is an award-winning poet, playwright, media artist, and filmmaker. In addition to authoring the books Nothing is Wasted (The Operating System, 2017), Forward (Museum Books, 2014) and Ode to Fragile (Plain View Press, 2010), she’s made films that have screened at film festivals, art galleries, and public installations around the world. She’s been awarded the Sonia Sanchez-Langston Hughes Poetry Award, Poets & Writers Amy Award, the Transport of the Aim Poetry Prize, the Brain Mill Press Editors’ Choice, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, a Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance Grant, a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Grant and a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. Her play “A Time to Speak” was staged at the MAD Theatre Festival in the United Kingdom. She is currently directing a documentary film entitled No Separate Survival about asylum seekers across the U.S.-Mexico border.  She is the founder and curator of the online art and interview journal MUSEUM. Her art has been exhibited at the Unlike Art Gallery, Elysium Art Gallery, New Gallery London, Youyou Gallery, Jotta, Kala Art Institute, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Galleria Perelà. You can read more about her work here.