Vidhu Aggarwal’s poetry and multimedia practices engage with world-building, video, and comic book media. Drawing from Hindu religious mythologies, Bollywood spectacle, and science fiction, her poetry book The Trouble with Humpadori (2016), won the Editor’s Choice Award with The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective. The Trouble with Humpadori imagines a cosmic mythological space for abject, marginalized transnational subjects in an increasing globalized world. Chosen by distributor Small Press Distribution as a February 2016 “Handpicked” selection by editors, reviewer David Coates has called the book “sprawling, ambitious, nightmarish.” Poems from Humpadori were listed as the top 25 from Boston Review in 2016 and appeared on Sundress Publications Best Poetry of 2016 list.
In addition, a suite of poems appeared Orlando Museum of Art’s catalogue for their “Baggage Claims” traveling exhibition. Other works have recently appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Texas Review. Her latest work, Avatara, is a chapbook available at Portable Press @Yo-Yo Labs. Avatara is situated in a post-apocalyptic gaming world where A.I.’s play at being gods. A Djerassi resident and Kundiman fellow, she teaches poetry and postcolonial/transnational studies at Rollins College.
