Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s parents fled Tibet in 1959. Raised by her mother in Tibetan communities in Dharamsala, India, and Kathmandu, Nepal, Dhompa earned a B.A. and an M.A. from Lady Shri Ram College in New Delhi, an M.A. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks In Writing the Names (2000) and Recurring Gestures (2000). She has published the full-length collections Rules of the House (2002), In the Absent Everyday (2005), and My Rice tastes like the lake (2011), which was a finalist for the Northern California Independent Bookseller’s Book of the Year Award for 2012. Dhompa's non-fiction book based on her life is called A Home in Tibet (Penguin India, 2013), published in the United States as Coming Home to Tibet: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Belonging (2016). At MacDowell in 2019, she worked on poems toward a collection, Nation: A Transitive, and finished two chapters toward a collection of essays/memoir on the formation of the Tibetan nation in exile tentatively titled Taming Citizens.
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
Studios
MacDowell
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa worked in the MacDowell studio.
Built in 1912, Pine Studio was renamed MacDowell Studio in 1943 in recognition of support from a group of Edward MacDowell’s music students. It was built as a composers’ studio and the stuccoed walls were intended to be soundproof. Like many of the studios on property, MacDowell was winterized in the 1950s when the program began welcoming…