Hajar Hussaini (MFA 2021) was named as one of 10 recipients of the 2026 Whiting Award, given annually to emerging writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. Each honoree receives $50,000 from the Whiting Foundation, one of the largest monetary gifts for early-career writers. 

Hussaini is the author of Disbound: Poems (University of Iowa Press, 2022). Her translations from Persian include Death and His Brother: A Novel by Khosraw Mani (Syracuse University Press, 2027), which won a 2025 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and Wounded Vita Nuda: Poems by Maral Taheri (Deep Vellum, 2027), which won the 2025 Mo Habib Translation Prize. She was a 2025 MacDowell fellow. Hussaini also co-curates the Salon Salvage performance and reading series in Troy, NY. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is an assistant teaching professor of English at Skidmore College and lives in Saratoga Springs, NY.

From the judges:

"Hajar Hussaini’s work is a marvel of poetic architecture, one that propels readers to consider what war destroys and what remains. Her poems exemplify how mere fragments can contain the entirety of times, places, and people we thought lost. Defiant, they refuse to equate that loss with erasure. Hussaini assembles the shards of her home city of Kabul into a mosaic, honoring its history, culture, and future."