Writing across Borders: A Reading and Conversation with Selma Asotić

Join us for a Reading & Conversation with Bosnian poet Selma Asotić. Moderated by Stacy Mattingly.

Selma Asotić is a bilingual poet from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her poems and essays have appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, EuropeNow, The Well Review, Calvert Journal, Barricade, FUSION, and elsewhere. She was a runner-up for the 2019 Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize. She also received a Pushcart nomination for her poem “Nana.” Her debut poetry collection, Reci vatra, was released in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia in 2022. It won the 2022 Stjepan Gulin Prize for best poetry collection in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro. It also won the 2023 Štefica Cvek prize, along with six other titles, for best work of feminist and queer literature published across the Yugoslav region. The English and German versions of the manuscript are forthcoming from Archipelago Books and Suhrkamp, respectively, in 2024. She holds an MFA degree from Boston University and is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Stacy Mattingly is coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Unlikely Angel, an Atlanta hostage story now a feature film, Captive. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Literary Hub, Oxford American, Off Assignment, EuropeNow, and elsewhere. Her recently completed novel, Kata, is set in the present-day Balkans, where she has collaborated with writers since 2012. She teaches in BU’s Arts & Sciences Writing Program and is an assistant professor at Berklee College of Music.