Interdisciplinary artist Teja Sudhakar was born in Chennai, India, and spent the majority of their life in Lexington, Kentucky. They are a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and a Poetry Coalition Fellow working at Woodland Pattern.
 

Sudhakar’s work explores queer and immigrant narratives from the Transnational South. Their chapbook Looking for Smoke is a collection of docupoetry entailing the experiences of five first-generation immigrant women living in Kentucky. In both their poetry and darkroom photography, Sudhakar asks questions about silence, the loss of one’s first language, intergenerational womanhood, tenderness, and memory.
 

Sudhakar is the winner of the 2024 Aliki Perroti and Seth Frank Most Promising Young Poet Award. About their poetry, Natasha Trethewey writes, “I am left marveling at what can be grasped and conveyed despite the seeming limitations of our many and varied tongues.”
 

Sudhakar’s poems have appeared in The Academy of American Poets, ONLYPOEMS, Salt Hill Journal, The Georgia Review, Mid-American Review, and others. They currently live in Riverwest, Milwaukee, with their partner and three cats.