Rajiv Mohabir is an Indo-Caribbean American author of five acclaimed poetry collections: The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books, 2014); Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press, 2017); Cutlish (Four Way Books, 2021), which was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award in Poetry; Whale Aria (Four Way Books, 2023); and the forthcoming Seabeast (Four Way Books, 2025). He is also the author of the hybrid memoir Antiman (Restless Books, 2021), finalist for the 2022 PEN Open Book Award and a 2022 Lambda Literary Awards in Gay Memoir/Biography.

Of Whale Aria, Aimee Nezhukumatathil writes, “Whale songs are classified into dynamic clicks, whistles, and pulsed calls — and just like these majestic giants, this book also carries desire and loneliness, twinned across these pages in bright and sagacious paths. You will revel at how Mohabir develops wholly new poetic forms from this iridescent ocean language. This book is simply a revelation.”

Capable in Hindi, Bhojpuri and a dying language known as “Guyanese Hindi,” Rajiv was awarded a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translation of Lalbihari Sharma’s Holi Songs of Demerara, published originally in 1916. Mr. Sharma was an indentured laborer, as well as a singer and a musician, on the sugarcane fields in Guyana. He was the first Indo-Caribbean writer to write and publish in his native dialect, a mix of Bhojpuri and Awadhi. His collection, I Even Regret Night (2019), is a translation of this text. In 2020 it received the Harold Morton Landon Award from the Academy of American Poets.

Mohabir’s poem “Ancestor” was chosen by Philip Metres for the 2015 AWP Intro Journal Award. His poems also received the 2015 Editor’s Choice Award from Bamboo Ridge Journal and the 2014 Academy of American Poet’s Prize for the University of Hawai‘i. His poem “Dove” appears in Best American Poetry 2015. Other poems and translations appear in journals such as Quarterly West, Guernica, The Collagist, The Journal, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, small axe, The Asian American Literary Review, Great River Review, and PANK. He has received several Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. He has received fellowships from Voices of Our Nationʻs Artist foundation, Kundiman, The Home School (where he was the Kundiman Fellow), and the American Institute of Indian Studies language program.

Rajiv holds a BA from the University of Florida in religious studies, an MSEd in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from Long Island University, Brooklyn, an MFA in poetry and literary translation from Queens College, CUNY where he was Editor in Chief of Ozone Park Literary Journal, and a PhD in English from the University of Hawai`i. Rajiv is currently a professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder.