• Bushra Rehman

    Bushra Rehman grew up in Corona, Queens but her mother says she was born in an ambulance flying through the streets of Brooklyn. Her father is not so sure, but it would explain a few things.

Marianna’s Beauty Salon AVAILABLE NOW!

“In Marianna’s Beauty Salon, a daughter-witness records the lifelong trades and private tolls of immigration: promise passed down to children who sing the songs of the new land, learning the charm and violence of strange streets. These poems travel memory’s vast landscapes and never quite get over love’s ability to simultaneously wound and sustain us. … Rehman’s poems are about home—the ones we inherit, flee. The homes we lose and still carry, and the homes we become for each other.” — Kamilah Aisha Moon, author of Starshine & Clay and She Has a Name

PURCHASE YOUR COPY HERE

Writing

Among the Rockets: New York Times

New York Times, Walker in NY series The streets of Corona swell with Muslims — men and young boys in new salwar kameez, sent special from family in Pakistan; women and girls, too, in reds, aquas and silvers, the kind usually found in the tails of mermaids and peacocks. We are headed early in the […]

The Lark Articles

On November 13, 2014, “Two Truths and a Lie,” a writing workshop I teach in NYC, was held up at gunpoint. After the robbery, the class became the invisible center in a maelstrom of tensions around the New York Police Department’s Stop-and-Frisk policy, gentrification, and the role of police in communities. Much of what was […]

Two Truths and a Lie: Writing Autobiographical Fiction Part II

First published on Poets & Writers online, September 2, 2013 Go to Part I One of the drawbacks of writing autobiographical fiction is that the people in your head are not imaginary. They’re real. They’re the people you love the most and are most afraid of losing. In the workshop Two Truths and a Lie: Writing […]

Two Truths and a Lie: Writing Autobiographical Fiction Part I

First Posted on Poets & Writers on August 26, 2013. Go to Part II The first question people always ask me about my novel Corona is if it’s true. Yes, like me the character is a Pakistani who grew up in Corona, Queens, worked as a Puritan in a living history museum, and hitchhiked up and down […]

Bushra Rehman on a Book and a Baby

First Posted in Poets & Writers online on August 9, 2013. “I just gave birth to a book and a baby. It turns out that in the time it took from the acceptance of my manuscript to the moment of its publication, I could create a small human being in my body. I’d never thought […]