Introduction

about

Photo by Mahwash Rahman

Sehba Sarwar is a writer, multidisciplinary artist, and activist, currently based in Houston, USA. She moves between the city of her birth, Karachi, Pakistan, where she spent the first half of her life in a home filled with artists, activists and educators, and her adopted city, Houston, where she has recreated a community similar to the one where she was raised. Her writings have appeared in anthologies, newspapers, and magazines in Canada, India, Pakistan, and the US, and her work (writings, installations and videos) explore displacement and women’s issues, moving between South Asia and the US.

Sarwar's first novel, Black Wings was published in 2004 (Alhamra Publishing, Pakistan), and her short stories have appeared in anthologies including And The World Changed (Feminist Press, New York) and in Neither Night Nor Day (Harper Collins, India). Alongside her fiction, Sarwar has published a wide range of essays in publications including The News on Sunday, The New York Times’ Sunday Magazine and Callaloo, while her poetry has been published in anthologies in Pakistan, Canada and the US.

In addition to her writings, Sarwar serves as artistic/ founding director of Voices Breaking Boundaries (VBB), a non-profit arts-activist organization in Houston, USA, through which she has created a series of video collages that have been screened in Pakistan, India, Egypt and the US. In an attempt to document the multiple realities she inhabits - writer, artist, mother, activist, dual citizen - Sarwar maintains a blog, Daily Noise, where she posts images, videos and words.

Currently, she's working on VBB's living room art series productions that explore histories, memories and stories and create connections between North America and South Asia, and a non-fiction narrative entitled What Is Home? for the Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston, where she serves as Artist-in-Residence (2012-14).

A member of Macondo Writers' Workshop, Sarwar serves on the boards of Voices Breaking Boundaries and Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast. Sarwar is an active voice at Houston's KPFT Pacifica Radio 90.1 FM, often teaching writing and multidisciplinary arts workshops at all levels in Pakistan and in the US.