Sanna Wani is a poet who lives in Mississauga, Ontario and Srinagar, Kashmir. Her chapbook The Pink of the Seams, published by Penrose Press is no longer available. Wani is the publicity and promotions manager and poetry editor at Fernwood Publishing.
Poetry
Lantern: Poems
Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2026.
forthcoming September 2026
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Meditating on the beauty of an ordinary life, Sanna Wani’s second poetry collection, Lantern, explores how we fall in love and make a home. What does it mean to belong to a city, or to truly enter adulthood? Imbued with a quiet queerness, this book is a guide for living in the aftermath of familial rifts, crises of faith, political struggle, and intergenerational grief—all while remaining devoted to an idea of goodness.
A love letter to Toronto, Lantern is grounded in subway stations and city parks yet textured like watercolour and linen. Wani writes with reverence for animals, trees and flowers, but does not avoid everyday difficulties—the burnout of a 9-5; her fraught homeland of Kashmir; or the reality of Islamophobia in Canada. Wani also addresses the craft and the limits of language. Lantern is kaleidoscopic in its queries: memory, mothering and morality refract through tarot, Sufism, and psychoanalysis.
Poetry
My Grief, the Sun: Poems
[Toronto]: House of Anansi Press, 2022.
PS8645.A655 M9 2022
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Sharply political and frequently magical, these poems reach for everything from Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 film Princess Mononoke to German Orientalist scholarship on early Islam. In these often intimate poems, every verse invokes ode and elegy. Love and grief sit side by side. My Grief, the Sun listens carefully to the world’s breathing, addresses the endless and ineffable you, and promises enough joy and sorrow to keep growing.
From concrete to confessional poem, exegesis to erasure, the Missinnihe River in Canada to the Zabarwan Mountains in Kashmir, Waniundoes and complicates genre and gathers the world between the poet’s hands.
Awards and Honours
2023 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (League of Canadian Poets)(Finalist)
2023 Trillium Book Award for Poetry (Winner)
Selected Criticism and Interpretation
Wani, Sanna. Interview with Tali Voron. The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing. No. 5 (Winter 2024), p. 78-84.
Links
Sanna Wani personal website
Publisher House of Anansi Press
Publisher Penrose Press – Out of print highlights