Zohra Saed

Zohra Saed is a Lecturer at the Macaulay Honors College, City University of New York (CUNY), specializing in Afghan American literature, transnational poetics, and cultural studies. She serves as Faculty Editor for the Lost and Found: CUNY Poetics Document Initiative and co-founder of UpSet Press Inc.. Her research focuses on Langston Hughes’ 1930s journey to Soviet Central Asia, resulting in edited volumes like Langston Hughes in Turkestan 1932-1933 (2015) and One Story, Thirty Stories (2010).

Her work bridges Black feminist internationalism, Central Asian literary histories, and migration narratives. Key engagements include a 2023 keynote at the University of Ohio on Hughes’ archival legacy and a 2022 TEDx talk analyzing Hughes’ poetic entanglements with Central Asian voices. Saed’s activism includes mobilizing a literary network to evacuate a threatened Uzbek Afghan family during the Taliban takeover (2021), documented in the New York Times.

Research interests span trauma poetics, translation ethics, and the intersection of foodways with cultural identity. Her essays and poetry explore themes of displacement, radical love, and diasporic memory, appearing in venues like Tongue: Online Literary Journal and Landmines of Memory. She frequently lectures on global literary networks, including Silk Road festivals and academic conferences on Arabic/Persian studies.