Synkroniciti is thrilled to announce the winner of our “Dreams” poetry contest, Ankita Sadarjoshi’s “graduation.” We had eight finalists and all of them will be included in the issue, along with many other fine and deserving poems. This was a extremely difficult field of poems to evaluate. If we publish you, we consider you a winner.
“Curiouser,” Judy McAmis
This is such a rich and varied field. We chose “graduation” in part because it told a story we don’t often hear, that of the international student. Leaving home for undeniably valuable education and opportunity, dreams shift and transform. This new country is not paradise, nor is education alone the answer to internal difficulties or difficulties at home, but the experience of being separated from heritage and family is formative. As a woman, Ankita is safer on the train and can be less inhibited, but she is also alone and under pressure to succeed. Ankita’s poetry is laced with nuanced imagery dancing over a vulnerability that is raw and ominous. Synkroniciti is pleased to accept three of her poems for this issue. I’ll have more to say in Ankita’s Artist Feature later this fall.
The runner-up was “Alien Nation” by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky.
You will want to read Ankita’s poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Dreams” issue, Vol. 7, No. 3, available for pre-order here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Ankita Sadarjoshi is a poet with an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago. With a background in dramatic arts, her central focuses include experimenting with the formal constraints of poetry, blending theatre and language, and writing ekphrastically. She writes about beauty, damage, domestic rot, psychological unravel, desire, and place. Her chapbook pink mortem was published by Bottlecap Press in December 2022. Her poems “sugarburn” and “The Kids Are Awry” have won Academy of American Poets Eileen Lannan Poetry Prizes. She taught writing to college students in Chicago but now writes and resides in Bangalore.