2026 Artist: Seelai Karzai

As Arts Marathon artists we will send a different example of our creative process and work to everyone who sponsors us, 3-5 days per week during April. We invite our friends, family, colleagues and anyone else who cares about art and wants to support Bridge to Rutland’s important work to sponsor us. Together we will help welcome new Americans who, in turn, will add immeasurably to our communities.

Seelai‘s Arts Marathon Goal

I will write weekly poems.

Seelai‘s Background

I write poetry and fiction. I also occasionally paint with watercolors. For me, poetry is an intersectional form of resistance, reflection, and collaboration. It is one tool of many I can use for healing the intergenerational trauma caused by war and displacement by creating a community based on shared values. This is especially important now, given my community's repeated, ongoing displacement and forced migration from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Iran to the United States and elsewhere.

I am currently working on a collection of poems titled "Suck The Lemon," which is an exploration of my journey toward self-love and joy. The idea of home appears in my work as an intangible feeling or as a source of perpetual exile, of never quite belonging in any space. Ideas of home also appear as places of surrealism and hope. I evoke this surrealism through the image of scattering seeds. For example, in my poem “Customs,” which I am proud to have published in a Queens, NY-based literary journal, an imagined dialogue between a second-person speaker and a US Customs and Border Protection agent ends, “The customs agent asks: / what is the purpose of your trip? / A handful of seeds flies from your ears.” Such images are a result of years-long conversations with my biological and chosen family, while fighting for racial and gender justice in New York City. I see my poetry as a record of history that is often pushed to the margins or disappeared, as well as a mirror that truthfully renders my identities, several different worlds I must constantly crisscross.

At a time when the United States has cruelly shut down its borders to people seeking asylum and migrants in exile, I am drawn to the Arts Marathon for its careful intent in bringing together a community built on love and shared humanity.

Find Seelai online

Art Samples