Sarah Ghazal Ali is the author of Theophanies (Alice James Books, 2024), selected as the Editors' Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award. A Djanikian Scholar, Stadler Fellow, and winner of the 2022 Sewanee Review Poetry Prize, her poems and essays appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor for West Branch and lives in the Bay Area, California. Learn more at sarahgali.com.

"With its formal triumphs and sure voice, Theophanies is a powerful debut. Ali unpacks the lineage of not only her name, but womanhood, from the mother of nations herself, and firmly marks her place in the matrilineal line.”
—Mudroom Magazine

"...as I remember that the crux of a theophany is the act of bestowment, I see how this collection interrogates the very definition of divine.”
—Swati Sudarsan, Northwest Review

"...questions lead to the speaker’s crisis of faith in the eponymously titled 'Theophanies': 'How to hold wide my eyes / for the ineluctable light?' (83). I am grateful that Ali doesn’t offer a glib answer. Instead, she looks beyond easy narratives about blind devotion, telling us to listen. 'Every temporal sight' she warns us, is 'either a miracle or mistake.' (83)"
—Rosanna Young Oh, RHINO Poetry

"This is a poet confident in her ability to rifle through the wreckage and canon of the world’s most popular religious histories to uncover the songs of the living and the dead."
—Sanna Wani, Canthius

“In Theophanies, the poised debut collection from Muslim poet Sarah Ghazal Ali, spiritual enlightenment is a female, embodied experience, mediated by matriarchs. … Wordplay, floral metaphors, and multiple ghazals make for dazzling language. Ali's poetry, both elegant and visceral, gives women's bodily and spiritual experiences primacy.”
—Rebecca Foster, Shelf Awareness Starred Review

“In Sarah Ghazal Ali‘s Theophanies she brings the best of both worlds, through this poetic exegesis of Islamic faith in a way that stunned me — page by page, poem by poem. Have you ever read a poetry collection that made you shout aloud how good it was while reading it? That’s the impact that this work impressed upon me as a reader.”
—Ronnie K. Stephens, The Poetry Question

“a stirring examination of faith, womanhood, and cultural inheritance through lyric poems that reimagine female figures and stories from the Islamic tradition. … Devoted to unsilencing voices through fresh language, Ali compels us toward more generous, inclusive ways of seeing, being in, and believing in the world.”
—Adedayo Agarau, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Ali's is one of the most sure-footed debuts I've had the pleasure to encounter in many years. Wrought with precision, control, and an astute humility before the wondrous, the profound and profane, these poems feel crafted from the sum total of history, then realized at the crest of the poet's matrix of experiences. A truly fearless and tender gem of a collection."
—Ocean Vuong

“Sarah Ghazal Ali’s debut collection, Theophanies, pulses with life—angels, cranes, and a woman’s own fierce potential, the miraculous and terrifying possibilities she holds within her heart, womb, and mind. Through sinuous lyric and religious persona, Ali delves unblinkingly into the depths of faith, family, and womanhood. These poems are bold, insistent reckonings that reach across time and geography, a chorus of female voices demanding to be heard.”
—Leila Chatti

”That god's words would be splintered into many forms and tongues is inevitable and appropriate. This book utilizes many forms, ancient and new, to contend with the long legacy of a multitude of spiritual traditions: the expulsion from the divine, living in gendered bodies, the fate of humans to live as mortal. There's music aplenty here to accompany difficult truths, and that is really all one can ask of god or garden or ghazal.”
—Kazim Ali