Author of the poetry collection, City of Pearls (UpSet Press 2019), Sham-e-Ali Nayeem is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans the modalities of poetry, music, experimental film, ritual, performance and immersive storytelling. Her work contemplates space, time, collective memory, and the multiplicity of absences in the face of calculated erasure revealing intersections of liminality between the living and the unseen.

Nayeem has two albums, City of Pearls (ft. Qais Essar, 2019) and Moti Ka Sheher (2023) featuring musical interpretations of her poetry resting in soundscapes ranging from classical rabab to her own self composed and produced electronica. These works are not just artistic expressions but personal explorations of identity, exile, and the power of poetics, technology and sound to transcend physical and temporal boundaries. Here, Nayeem approaches sound and poetics as a medium for contemplating grief and resistance in the face of erasure. She is also featured on Moor Mother’s single, Change (2020) and Sonny Singh’s Rebel (2024). 

Nayeem is the screenwriter of the award winning experimental film ‘Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?)’ (2023) directed by Suneil Sanzgiri. The film tells the stories of the mutual struggle in India and Africa against Portuguese colonialism, highlighting the solidarity that developed between the two continents during the 1960s and 1970s.  The film asks, how do we live through and narrate moments of revolution and revolt, and how do we understand these experiences across time and distance? Her poetic screenplay weaves through Sanzgiri’s brilliant archival images, songs, and interviews connecting a multiplicity of histories and geographies. Here Sanzgiri and Nayeem non linearly create a channel that connect to the present offering an “alternative to the modalities of censorship, disappearance, and dispossession.”

Nayeem’s poetry has appeared in Apiary, The Margins, Wildness Journal (Platypus Press), Origins Journal, Mizna and numerous anthologies, including Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out (Olive Branch Press, 2005), Living Islam Out Loud: American Muslim Women Speak (Beacon Press, 2005) and Shout Out: Women of Color Respond to Violence (Seal Press, 2008).

A graduate of Oberlin College and Northeastern University School of Law, Nayeem is the recipient of the 2022 Leeway Transformation Award, 2016 Loft Literary Center Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship and 1997 Echoing Green Fellowship.