With great love, I am offering a Community Call to pause, connect, and ask ourselves ::

How and where is the present moment asking us to rebalance ourselves as we continue to dream, imagine, and build the new world that is emerging?

Thursday, February 12 | 6pm Pacific | On Zoom

​This interactive call will not be recorded. Cameras on requested.

In this powerful evening, Ayesha Nadir Ali will trace the mythic evolution of Heer, one of South Asia’s most enduring archetypes of the feminine. Through traditional and folk compositions, Ali will take us on a journey in which Heer’s story moves from early folkloric narrations in Hindu/Persian literature to timely social commentary. The performance will include selections from Damodar’s classic text and Waris Shah’s epic verse, as well as compositions by avant-garde Punjabi poet Najm Hosain Syed, to reveal the shifting spiritual, cultural, and poetic dimensions of Heer, set to ragas and melodies shaped by centuries of oral tradition.
 
Following the performance, Ali and Monica Mody will be in conversation to discuss how, in a world that is captured by violence and conflict, the mythic terrain we share with those separated from us through borders—physical or otherwise—could offer new pathways of remembering and peace. 
 
Friday, August 1, 6:45pm-8:45pm
Barrett Center, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 801 Ladera Ln, Santa Barbara, CA 93108

Free and open to the public. Tickets: https://extension.pacifica.edu/heer-across-the-ages/

A few days ago, I presented “Where We Might Go in Lieu of Posthumanism: Building Indigenous and Decolonial Epistemologies” at Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Journey Week 2024 conference. The session was recorded and will be available for the next six months. If you would like to watch the recording, you can do so here. This was the first time I formalized my thinking in these areas, and I have some ideas about changes I’ll make in my next iteration of the presentation—which I am looking forward to creating, as and when I get the time and opportunity. Until then, if this is of interest, please enjoy the recording.

Presentation Abstract:
​
The genealogy of posthumanism as a philosophy permits us to see its links to colonial/imperial projects and warfare. This presentation will invite us to consider where we might go in lieu of posthumanism. Locating technology as a premise of making that arises out of the entanglement of body-mind-soul-spirit with Earth allows us to question the inevitability of exploitative technology predicated on environmental destruction (such as AI research). Equally, it allows us to rise above a naïve faith that technological innovations that have their origin in the military industrial complex have benevolent aims.
​
Instead, the presentation will attend to the elemental conversation with the Earth that is seeking to make itself known. What futures can emerge when we awaken to our inner capacity for relationship with(in) a multi-species world—and co-create with the same—instead of superseding the responsibility of relationship to algorithmic processes that have been pre-programmed? Through the indigenous and decolonial epistemologies of imagination, story, poetry, prayer, and play, we will realign ourselves with the deeper story that emerges as the riverbed of our knowing, watered with multiple streams comprising mythic and ancestral intelligence together with the multiple intelligences that form our planetary consciousness. Casting our awareness back to the seven generations past and forward to the seven generations to come—through psychospiritual modalities making possible embodied and inspirited critique, revelation, and empowerment—we will seed renewed understandings of human consciousness, spirit, and evolutionary communal care.

​Rob McLennan has been curating a monthly poet "spotlight" via Medium, and, this month, the series features a poem of mine along with an author statement. 

A few days ago, The Bangalore Review published a conversation I had with poet and artist Sophia Naz. We discussed poetry and the unsayable, Sandhya Bhasha, renewal, memories that survive surveillance, oral traditions, women and flying, animist perspectives, and more. 

Now Sophia and I will be reading together at the San Francisco Public Library in April. We will be at the Latino/Hispanic Meeting Room in the Main Library. Please join us if you can. 

​Roots and Resonance

A reading by two South Asian diasporic poets, Monica Mody and Sophia Naz, whose poetry takes on/seeks to retell the histories and memories of the sacred and the profane, the oral and the experimental, the liminal and the subliminal, India and Pakistan. The poets share commonalities across partitioned ancestral stories, and they persist through the ambiguities of singing the dead to life. 

Sunday, April 14, 1pm-2:30pm.

Hello all,

​​It fills me with delight to announce the imminent arrival of Wild Fin, my new poetry collection from Weavers Press. The book is now available for pre-order.

The art that is featured on the cover is a detail from San Francisco-based Anne Marguerite Herbst's magnificent painting, "Lighthouse Present."

Deep gratitude to Maw Shein Win, Carrie Hunter, and Divya Victor for contributing their amazing blurbs to the book! 

This interview celebrating Bright Parallel was published on the CIIS website in September. Thank you very much for the great questions, Christina Fanciullo! Read below:

​What inspired this collection?

I was not consciously working towards a collection as I wrote the poems included in Bright Parallel, even as I developed them concurrently with my doctoral studies and research at CIIS. Over the years, many poems were published in a number of journals, magazines, and anthologies. I started putting together a manuscript in 2019 while I was in India after having earned my Ph.D. I was waiting for my work authorization to come through, and a conversation with a fellow poet and friend instigated the process. These are poems about feminist unsilencing, ancestral reclamation, earth connection, ritual, the goddess, language, belonging, and a remythologizing of the self.

What sustained you through the process of exploration and creation?

During the process of writing poetry, one can get access to a kind of poetic knowing which allows one to touch something vaster and more entangled than the rational, objective self. Since my academic and epistemological project was about the knitting together of the fragments within my/our stories and realities, I turned to poetry as one of the methods to facilitate the weaving. I also have, I believe, an older pact with poetry where I must make space, sooner or later, when it knocks, to listen and to bring what I hear into form.

How does your writing intersect with your teaching?

I have been very fortunate to have been invited to teach courses that help me deepen my relationship with theories and paradigms I am interested in such as the embodied thealogy of Tantra and visionary imagination. Continuing to think into transformational philosophies — while developing syllabi, for instance, but especially during conversations in class — nourishes me and clarifies for me emergent/nascent ideas. When I get to teach courses on writing (academic or creative), animated discussions about craft and process often ensue — which are usually equally good reminders for my own writing practice!

Readers have praised your “attunement to the natural world.” How do you maintain your groundedness to the earth in your work?

Through practices such as walking, ritual, making offerings, etc., I come to know the self as centered not only in a ‘me’ but as a relational constellation attuning to the wild-at-large: something wild, provisional, expansive. My work grows out of these relational ontogenetic practices. The living presence(s) I encounter guides, ideally, the images, metaphoric field, language, scope, and soul of the work. 

​It is an incredible honor to finally be able to share with you that this Fall I will be starting as Core Professor in the Mythological Studies Program at the Pacifica Graduate Institute. I am always amazed by the directions that Spirit opens for me—the steering often skitters me "off course" from what the ego had penned as desirable; a course more in integrity with the deeper purpose reveals itself. To all my teachers, mentors, students, colleagues, family, friends, and ancestors—shukriya, thank you. I arrive into the knowing of my work because of you, your trust and support. May the work I offer continue to feed the soul well of the world. May even more robust currents of reciprocity open up. To my colleagues in the Myth Program who have welcomed me so fulsomely, my gratitude. To be welcomed for all of my onto-epistemic commitments—relational post/decolonial scholarship, borderlands feminisms, as well as my creative work and vision, and brown, transnational self—is such a gift. I am excited and proud to be working alongside the good people of this esteemed program, and at Pacifica, whose mission to tend soul in and of the world resonates with me. May we redream our dream of the world and our role in it together.

Please join me for the book launch for Bright Parallel at the California Institute of Integral Studies on August 24 at 2PM. I will be reading from the collection and be in conversation with Carolyn Cooke.

Free and open to the public. Desai | Matta Gallery, CIIS, 1453 Mission St, San Francisco, SF 94103.

My thanks to The Arts and MFA Programs at CIIS for hosting the launch.

The poems are beacons for me too. 

They hold in them the gentle, fiery guidance of transformation and the remainders of maps. Make your own map; you are the key. They track the unraveling of self, identity, identifications. They trace a becoming—how the ancestors, the motherline opened its embrace wide and invited me in. These are the poems in which I stepped all the way in—I was not pretending. The trail leads me yet again to Her eye, unclouded and clear-seeing, where life begins.

Then it is not unusual at all that with its publication, the book has searched me for all the ways in which the ego holds one in trance: Do you compare well to others? Do you please others? The trance still has a bit of hold on you, the poems laugh at me. They have already counted my deaths and are ready to witness me die again, be reborn, here for the long game. The spiral moves, still. 

*

But a bit of thanks also (beyond that acknowledged in the book). To Jeet Thayil, who may not remember this, but who—in the way he can be blunt, in the way he does the work of art—chided me, when he heard about the poems in my dropbox, for not putting them together as a book, for not already working on my second book. That nudge over dinner was what got me to move through my alienation from certain anthropological practices in spaces that produce and promote literature, to begin working on the manuscript that became Bright Parallel. The earliest unwieldy draft started right then, in Bangalore.

A second thanks to Ranjit Hoskote. I had begun communication with the amazing Ashwini Bhat in March 2022—I knew I wanted a woman artist from South Asia on the book's cover—just like for my chapbook Ordinary Annals, for which Palija Shrestha was kind enough to let us use her painting—isn't it true that the worlds we are a part of even now are defined and ordered by the hegemonies of masculine subjectivities—and Ashwini's work is exquisite, she is exploring some of the same faultlines in culture, nature, and spirit I have been trying to put my finger on. It was Ranjit who went through her oevre and found "Fainting in Coils 5." He said, "I like it for the same reasons as you do - the relay of material difference, the interplay of past and future, the mythic resonances of coils and (un)coiling." I said, "I love this image. The contrast of ceramic and thread, continuity/fragment, history/future, susurration..." "And the evocation of mossiness..."