Ladan Osman


Ladan Osman is a Somali-American poet, director, and photographer. Her poetry is centered on themes of dislocation and migration, and has been published in a number of prominent literary magazines. In 2014, she was awarded the annual Sillerman First Book Prize for her collection The Kitchen Dweller's Testimony. In 2020, she was awarded the Hurston/Wright Legacy award for her collection Exiles of Eden. She was awarded a 2021 Whiting Award for her poetry.

Personal life

Osman was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, and grew up in Columbus, Ohio in the United States.
Osman studied at the University of Texas at Austin's Michener Center for Writers, where she obtained an MFA.
Additionally, Osman has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Union League Civic & Arts Foundation, Cave Canem Foundation, and Michener Center for Writers.

Career

Osman is an artist by profession.
Her verse has been featured in a number of poetry publications, including , Narrative Magazine, , and Prairie Schooner. Her poems have also appeared in former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's syndicated newspaper column, "American Life in Poetry".
Her chapbook, Ordinary Heaven, was released in March 2014. Her first full-length collection, The Kitchen-Dweller's Testimony, was published in 2015 and was decorated with the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets.
Her photographs, performances and experimental media have been exhibited by Jenkins Johnson Gallery, Bienal de São Paulo, Fotogalerie Friedrichshain, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Arts Incubator, and the New York African Film Festival

Awards

In February 2014, Osman was named the winner of the annual Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets for her collection The Kitchen Dweller's Testimony. The $1000 award was accompanied by the publication of her poetry anthology by the University of Nebraska Press in conjunction with Amalion Press.
In October 2020, Osman won a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for her second collection Exiles of Eden.
In April 2021, Osman received a Whiting Award. Her selection committee citation reads: Informed by world events as well as ancient myths, Ladan Osman’s dazzling and incisive poetry creates vibrant connections between generations of women, between the self and history, and between our bodies and the natural world. Some of her most fiercely imagined poems incorporate photographs, opening up a charged space between what is seen and what is heard. Marked by a capacious imagination and an emotionally resplendent sense of metaphor, her lines fray and pile up, pushing the vital, potent lyric further.
Osman was awarded and ECU Award for Best Independent Documentary, and a Dikalo Award for Best Short Documentary.