Tsering Wangmo Dhompa


Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is the first Tibetan female poet to be published in English. She was raised in India and Nepal. Tsering received her BA from Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi. She pursued her MA from University of Massachusetts and her MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. She has a Ph.D. in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz and is currently an associate professor in the English Department at Villanova University. Her first book of poems, Rules of the House, published by Apogee Press in 2002, was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Awards in 2003. Other publications include, most recently a chapbook Revolute,My Rice Tastes Like the Lake, In the Absent Everyday, and two chapbooks: In Writing the Names and Recurring Gestures. In Letter For Love she delivered her first short story. In 2013, Penguin India published Tsering's first full-length book, A Home in Tibet, in which she chronicles her successive journeys to Tibet and provides ethnographic details of ordinary Tibetans inside Tibet.

Books

  • The Politics of Sorrow: Unity and Allegiance Across Tibetan Exile, Columbia University Press 2025
  • Revolute, Albion Books, VA 2021
  • Coming Home to Tibet, Shambhala Publications, Boulder 2016
  • A Home in Tibet, Penguin India, Delhi 2013
  • My Rice Tastes Like the Lake, Apogee Press, Berkeley 2011
  • In the Absent Everyday, Apogee Press, Berkeley 2005
  • Rules of the House, Apogee Press, Berkeley 2002
  • Recurring Gestures, Tangram Press,
  • In Writing the Names, Abacus, 2000

Anthologies

Articles

  • "This Word as an Illusion", Evening will Come, March 2011Letter For Love, Caravan Magazine, Vol. 2, Issue 08
  • "After the Earthquake", Phayul April 29, 2010
  • ''Nostalgia in Contemporary Tibetan Writing''