Saba Keramati has won the 2025 Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize for her collection Self-Mythology. Housed and managed by the University of New Hampshire’s English Department, the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize honors a first book published by a U.S. poet of genuine promise in the previous calendar year, as well as the press that brought the book into the world.
The judge of the 2025 prize was renowned poet Matthew Olzmann.
In the search for a true home, what does it mean to be confronted instead by an insurmountable sense of otherness? This question dwells at the center of Saba Keramati’s Self-Mythology, which explores multiraciality and the legacy of exile alongside the poet’s uniquely American origin as the only child of political refugees from China and Iran. Keramati navigates her ancestral past while asking what language and poetry can offer to those who exist on the margins of contemporary society. Constantly scanning her world for some likeness that would help her feel less of an outsider, the poet writes, “You could cut me in half. Send the left side with my mother, / right with my father. Shape what’s missing out of clay // from their lands and still I would not belong.” Blending the personal and the political, Self-Mythology considers the futurity of diaspora in America while revealing its possibilities.
Self-Mythology was a finalist for the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, selected by Patricia Smith.
Saba Keramati is a writer, editor, and educator from the Bay Area. A winner of the 2023 92NY Discovery Poetry Contest, she received her MFA from UC Davis. Her writings have appeared in Adroit Journal, AGNI, The Margins, Poet Lore, and other publications. The poetry editor for Sundog Lit, Keramati currently lives in Dearborn, Michigan, with her partner and cats.