Poet Profile

Shloka Shankar

Shloka Shankar is a freelance writer, editor, and visual artist from Bangalore, India. She enjoys experimenting with Japanese short-forms and myriad found poetry techniques. A Best of the Net Nominee, her poems and artwork have appeared in over 200 online and print venues of repute. Shloka is the founding editor of the literary & arts journal Sonic Boom, its imprint Yavanika Press, as well as one of the Assistant Editors of Human/Kind Journal. She also serves as Editor for Velvet Dusk Publishing. When she isn’t poring over manuscripts, she dabbles in other forms of creative expression such as abstract art, collage, and music.

Awards and Other Honors:

Shloka is the recipient of the Promising Haijin and Editor Award, conferred by INHaiku at the TRIVENI World Haiku Utsav in 2016. She co-edited naad anunaad: an anthology of contemporary world haiku (Vishwakarma Publications, 2016) with the illustrious Kala Ramesh at the helm, and edited the arithmetic of sparrows (Yavanika Press, 2018), a collection of the top 100 haiku published in the Paper Lanterns section of Sonic Boom between 2014 and 2017. Her debut full-length haiku collection is forthcoming in 2020.

almost 
dusk 
i
confront
my
otherness 

space-time continuum :: we become each other’s soliloquies

inside a raven’s caw the simulacrum of memory

the whiteness of language under my hands

the mutation of ideas in sweater weather

rain check       the shelf life of opportunities

Credits:

“almost dusk” – Failed Haiku Vol. 1, Issue 6, 2016; “space-time continuum” – Frameless Sky Issue 10, 2019; “inside a raven’s caw” – Under the Basho, One-line haiku section, 2019; “the whiteness” – Wales Haiku Journal, Summer 2019; “the mutation” – Failed Haiku Vol. 2, Issue 18, 2017; “rain check” – Frameless Sky Issue 7, 2018.