Our Bureau
Bloomington, IN
The Academy of American Poets has awarded the Indiana University’s graduate student, Tejaswini (Teja) Sudhakar, Poetry Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) ’25 candidate in the College of Arts and Sciences, with the Aliki Perroti and Seth Frank Most Promising Young Poet Award. This award, established in 2013, recognizes a student poet 23 years of age or younger and honors with a cash prize of $1,000 and publication on Poets website
Born in Chennai, India, and living half of their life in Lexington, Kentucky, Teja didn’t learn to love language until they had a tutor who changed their life by showing them the fun of word play. Teja’s English tutor, Carole Johnston, taught her SAT words and developed her writing skills at the dinner table throughout middle school.
“We would learn some vocab, and then she would ask me to use all of the new words I learned in a creative paragraph,” Teja said. “I found myself looking forward to those 10 minutes of class every week.”
“As an immigrant with a mostly fraught relationship to language, especially to my mother tongues,” she said, “I think it was so important for me to be given permission to play. I feel so lucky that my first experience with poetry was one that prioritized joy and catharsis.”
“Poetry felt like the first thing in my life that I discovered for myself, and pursued with intent, out of my own interest,” she said. “Poetry was also the first place where my difference was celebrated, and where I realized my immigrant experience was worth documenting.”
Teja was surprised to hear that she had won the Most Promising Young Poet award – mostly because she had never entered any poems for it. She submitted poetry for IU’s Vera Strube Meyer award for graduate students last spring and won.
“It turns out,” Teja said, “the Academy enters all the university prize winners who are under the age of 23 into a separate, larger award, and has a different poet judge that contest every year.”
In 2020, Teja published a poetry collection titled Looking for Smoke as her undergraduate thesis.
