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Faisal Mohyuddin

Born: Elmhurst, Illinois
Pen Name: None

Connection to Illinois: Mohyuddin was born in Elmhurst. He was raised in Matteson and Rolling Meadows. He currently resides in Oak Park and teaches in Highland Park.

Biography: Faisal Mohyuddin is a writer, artist, and educator. He is the author of The Displaced Children of Displaced Children, and the chapbook, The Riddle of Longing. The recipient of Prairie Schooner's Edward Stanley Award and a Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, his work appears in the Missouri Review, Narrative, Crab Orchard Review, Poet Lore, RHINO, Tinderbox, Chicago Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere. An alumnus of the U.S. Department of State's Teachers for Global Classrooms program, Faisal is a graduate of Carleton College, Northwestern University, and Columbia College Chicago. He teaches English at Highland Park High School in Illinois and, since 2003, has served as an educator adviser to Narrative 4, the global not-for-profit dedicated to empathy-building and barrier-breaking through the exchange of stories. He is an alumnus of the U.S. Department of State's Teachers for Global Classrooms (TGC) Program; as part of this global education fellowship, Faisal traveled to and studied in Senegal in April 2016. He has been recognized for innovative teaching by Microsoft and has twice been a National Endowment for the Humanities summer teaching fellow. As a visual artist, Faisal regularly showcases his work in the Chicago area, including in the recent Ta'weez Project No. 1, an exhibition with fellow artists Zafar Malik and Sadia Uqaili.


Awards:
  • The Displaced Children of Displaced Children 2017 Sexton Prize, 2018 Summer Recommendation, Poetry Book Society
  • Other Awards Prairie Schooner's Edward Stanley Award, Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, Illinois Center for the Book, 2017

Primary Literary Genre(s): Fiction; Poetry

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers

E-Mail: fmohyu@gmail.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/fmohyu?lang=en
Web: http://https://www.faisalmohyuddin.com/
Web: https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/faisal_mohyuddin


Selected Titles

Elsewhere: An Elegy
ISBN: 1736672150 OCLC:

Next Page Press 2024

Elsewhere: An Elegy meditates on the complexities of loss, on how private and everlasting the weight of grief is, how impossible it can feel to find stillness when memory and music continue to pull one back into heartache. Moving between short fragmented "answers" to the same lingering question, deconstructed haibun dedicated to ghosts and cowards, and dream sequences that ask what it means to lose one's father while one is first learning how to become a father, the speaker in Elsewhere: An Elegy cannot but help see himself as his own father, and his infant son as his own young self still held by innocence and wholeness. The speaker, with a slowly gathering sense of compassion admits, "I've still not divined / how to unhusk this steadfast / grief from my poems." Ultimately, he comes to recognize that the most healing way to grieve is to give, is to translate loss into generosity, pain into poetry.

The displaced children of displaced children /
ISBN: 1912477068 OCLC: 1006298753

Eyewear Publishing 2018

Mohyuddin's craft is composed of measurable touches that go hardly noticed. There is the jelly-fish in space (lament though the poem may be), a talking banana, binging on pumpkin pie. The title refers to diaspora and the poems refer to families in and immigrants from Pakistan, with literal landscapes and clear memories to be enjoyed. And yet, the subject matter is overtaken by such themes as boundary, legacy, loss, claim. Whether a long narrative poem, or shorter lyric poems, these are the works of a poet, mature in his concerns and thinking.

 

 

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