Serena Chopra, while foremost a poet, is also a dancer, filmmaker, and a visual and performance artist. She is an assistant professor at Seattle University and has her Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Denver.
She has written two books, This Human (Coconut Books, 2013), and Ic (Horse Less Press, 2017) as well as two films: Dogana/Chapti (2018), which won grants and several recognitions at festivals, and Mother Ghosting (2018). Her recent written works have been in Sink, Foglifter, Matters of Feminist Practice, and the anthology Alone Together: Love, Grief and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19 (Central Avenue Publishing). In the fall of 2020, she co-directed No Place to Go, an artist-made queer haunted house with choreographer Kate Speer and artist Frankie Toan.
Chopra is a Kundiman Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar (Bangalore, India) and was featured in Harper’s Bazaar (India) and Denver Westword’s “100 Colorado Creatives.”
While at MacDowell, Chopra completed and revised major portions of her third book, Dayawati, Of Mercy, a poetic memoir about immigration, intergenerational domestic violence and epigenetic trauma, mental illness, and healing in proximity to trauma and mercy. The book will be presented alongside short films composed of images of her family.
Portrait by Kasey Ferlic
