About

Rajiv Mohabir was born in London, England to Guyanese parents. He grew up in New York City and in the Greater Orlando Area in Florida.

Selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the 2014 Intro Prize in Poetry by Four Way Books for his The Taxidermistʻs Cut (Four Way Books 2016), Rajiv Mohabir's first collection is a finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry. His second book The Cowherd’s Son won the 2015 Kundiman Prize (Tupelo Press in May 2017). In 2021 Mohabir’s poetry collection Cutlish (Four Way Books, 2021) was longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, received a silver medal from the Northern California Publishers and Authors, was a “must read book” from the Mass Book Awards from the Massachusetts Center for the Book, a finalist for the New England Book Awards, received the Eric Hoffer Medal Provacateur, was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award, and was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award. Cutlish also received second place in the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2022. His fourth collection, Whale Aria (Four Way Books 2023) received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Forward Indies, the Bronze Medal from the Northern California Publishers and Authors, and was a finalist and received and Honorable Mention from the Eric Hoffer Award.

Mohabir was also awarded the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, and a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translation of Lalbihari Sharma’s I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (Kaya Press 2019), published originally in 1916.

In 2019 Rajiv Mohabir also received the New Immigrant Writing Award from Restless Books for his memoir Antiman, selected by Terry Hong, Héctor Tobar, and Ilan Stavans ( Restless Books, 2021). His memoir received a Forward Indies Award for LGBTQ+ Adult Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Nonfiction, The Publishing Triangle’s Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and the 2022 PEN Open Book Award. Animan was a finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2022.

Winner of the inaugural chapbook prize by Ghostbird Press for Acoustic Trauma, he is the author of three other multilingual chapbooks: Thunder in the Courtyard: Kajari Poems, A Veil You’ll Cast Aside, na mash me bone, and na bad-eye me. In 2021 he collaborated with Aotearoa based poet Rushi Vyas to write Between Us, Not Half a Saint.

In 2022 he was awarded a fellowship by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Mohabir holds a BA from the University of Florida in religious studies, an MSEd in TESOL from Long Island University, Brooklyn, and an MFA in poetry from Queens College, CUNY. While in New York working as a public school teacher, he also produced the nationally broadcast radio show KAVIhouse on JusPunjabi (2012-2013). He received his PhD in English from the University of Hawai’i and is an assistant professor of poetry in the Department of English at the University of Colorado Boulder.