Selma Asotić

Selma Asotić has consistently blended expressions of love with reflections of sociopolitical trauma across her poetry catalog, effectively utilizing verse as a means of revolution and reconstruction in a postwar landscape. Asotić’s most recent collection, Say Fire (Archipelago, 2025), grapples with the lingering effects of the Bosnia-Herzegovina war, and according to World Literature Today, “reconstructs a world of fragmented representation arising from the oblivion of snuffed-out lives, loves, and memories.”

Raised in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Asotić attended the University of Sarajevo for her undergraduate studies and earned her M.F.A. in poetry at Boston University. She has taught writing at both BU and NYU, and worked in translation/interpretation. In 2022, Asotić’s first poetry collection, Reci vatra (Raštan Publishing), was released in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, and won the Stjepan Gulin Prize, an annual literary award honoring the best poetry collection published across the post-Yugoslav region. In 2023, Reci vatra was also awarded the Štefica Cvek Prize, which celebrates literary work that criticizes society from an underrepresented point of view.

Asotić will read on Tuesday, December 1 at 7 p.m. with Susan L. Leary, followed by a conversation with Adrie Rose. Note: this reading will be virtual-only, on Zoom. Registration is required, but the event is free and open to the public.

• “My father’s skin looks like the surface of the moon”, “Assimilation”, “No one writes home”, “My aunt smokes and thinks of nothing”, and “Questions my mother will never ask”.
• they descend upon us
• Landscape with footprints in ash