Welcome to the October 2017 edition of Blue Heron Speaks. Our featured author this month is the very talented and insightful poet, Prerna Bakshi, author of Burnt Roti, With Love (Les Éditions du Zaporogue, Denmark, 2016). In these poems about identity and belonging, we are asked to reflect on how important our stories are. Our family history lives on, each time we share them. Bakshi also examines the struggles of discrimination faced when leaving one’s country of origin and how important it is to never forget our roots. In one poem, the familiar sound of one’s mother tongue provides great comfort to the speaker’s baby. Sometimes the greatest gift is honoring memory and celebrating where we came from. When we keep our stories alive, this bond crosses generations and honors our love for family. In the end, our stories are what matter, they are at our core, and no one can take that away from us, as the author writes, “…on the road to Patel Nagar—the road/ to his heart,/ the shortest route there was.”

Visit the Blue Heron Speaks Featured Author page of our site, to read 3 poems by Prerna Bakshi and to learn more about her work.

Prerna Bakshi is a writer, poet and activist of Indian origin, currently based in Macao. Described by Catch News as a “fiery feminist,” she is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of the full-length poetry collection, Burnt Rotis, With Love (Les Éditions du Zaporogue, Denmark, 2016). Her book was long-listed for the 2015 Erbacce – Press Poetry Award in the UK and was cited as one of the “9 Poetry Collections That Will Change The Way You See The World” by Bustle magazine in the US. Her work has been published in over 100 literary journals, magazines, media, and newspapers, including The Huffington Post, The Kashmir Monitor, Chiron Review and TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism, as well as anthologized in several collections, most recently in A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault by Civil Coping Mechanisms (2017). She tweets at @bprerna. For more information: http://prernabakshi.strikingly.com/