In 2006, after attending a poetry panel at the University of Texas at Austin which featured the Bengali author Mahmud Rahman.

He had translated an excerpt of a novel, Talaash, by a writer named Shaheen Akhtar, which described the life of a woman who had been raped by Pakistani soldiers during the 1971 Liberation War.

After applying and receiving a Fulbright scholarship, she traveled to Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2010 to interview survivors of these atrocities, whom the Bengali government has dubbed birangona.

[5] Her second book, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf Press, 2018), was in development for 15 years and discusses many personal themes; it interrogates questions of memory, faith and locations beyond Bangladesh.

[3] Until 2019 she served at the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers’ Program as the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor in Poetry.