The Lewis Honors College’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council proudly hosts The Interviewer Asks: A Docupoetry Reading with Teja Sudhakar on Tuesday, April 12th at 4:00pm either in the Lewis Hall Scholar’s Lounge or on Zoom. This event is hybrid. In-person attendees will enjoy light refreshments from Martine’s Pastries, a local immigrant women-owned business. Zoom attendees may register here to attend remotely: https://uky.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0sfuyurDkqG9AErQc97AeU4ErWxEZWLBEO
Teja Sudhakar’s original, interdisciplinary work merges oral history and poetry and explores how immigrant women in Lexington, Kentucky conceptualize and navigate borders, homes, places, and spaces. Teja’s docupoetry amplifies women’s voices and interprets their stories gathered through her collaborative oral history project with diverse immigrant women in our community. Docupoetry, a tradition of expressing investigative research through lyrical acts, is driven by the researcher’s own positionality and process of learning alongside their data. Teja’s own negotiations of identity as a first-generation immigrant woman of color imbue the recorded stories exchanged with her narrators, women tracing their origins to Mexico, Pakistan, Canada, Syria, and France. Her poetry provides a beautiful and moving window into how women weave together memory, identity, and place. Please join us for the first public reading from Teja’s poetry chapbook Looking for Smoke.
Teja is a double-major in Gender and Women's Studies and Psychology, with a minor is creative writing. She immigrated to the United States from Tamil Nadu, India when she was 5 years old. Sudhakar has received some of the University of Kentucky's highest honors, including the Singletary Scholarship, the Gaines Center for the Humanities Fellowship, and admission into the Lewis Honors College, where in 2019 she founded The Work in Progress Society--the only student-led writing workshop housed at LHC. She would go on to direct the group for the next three years. While at Gaines and Lewis, Sudhakar would also complete apprenticeships under Dr. Rebecca Gayle Howell and Dr. Zada Komara, and in 2021, she collaborated with Howell to co-moderate the Lewis Honors College keynote by the Kingsley Tufts Awarded poet, Ross Gay. Sudhakar's first language is Telugu, her second language is Tamil, and her third is English. She writes in English. Her first chapbook, hold fire (2020), a collection of poems that combines the confessional mode with feminist Hindu myth revision, received U.K.'s top prize for undergraduate creative research, The Oswald Award. Her second chapbook, Looking for Smoke (2022), presents a sequence of docu-poems that explore Kentucky women's immigration narratives, including the poet's own. In recent weeks, Sudhakar has received admission into several top ranked M.F.A. programs in the U.S., one of which she will attend upon graduation.
