About the Director
SPECIAL POET FELLOW Palavi Ahuja (she/her) is a filmmaker and poet from Birmingham, Alabama. She earned her BA in English w/ a concentration in Literature as well as in Media Studies from the University of Alabama in Birmingham. She is currently working on her MFA in Poetry from Columbia University in New York. Palavi’s experiences as an Indian woman in America strongly impacts her work, often merging the realms of spoken word poetry and filmmaking. She tells visually and rhythmically impactful stories of her cultural identity and family history. Her film, Letters from an Avalanche, is a documentation of her journey as a writer and filmmaker through the lens of an entity much larger than ourselves—avalanches. It was screened at the 2022 Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham. Her poetry is featured in University of Central Missouri’s literary journal of new writing and reviews, Pleiades. Her interests in both film and poetry often lend themselves to one another and she hopes to continue to find new ways to make the two disciplines mix.
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