Bushra Rehman’s novel celebrates the Pakistani-American community in Queens

Author Bushra Rehman discusses her novel, Roses in the Mouth of a Lion, which is loosely based on her own girlhood growing up in a tightly knit Pakistani American community in Corona, Queens, and slowly opening up to her own queer identity. Rehman talks about her own upbringing and her desire to celebrate that community and show its many facets, her discovery of the larger world, and the found family that she created especially through writing groups such as the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective,Cave Canem, and Kundiman. We talk about her beginning her writing journey as a poet, her time as spoken work poet by night and poetry teacher by day, her desire to write fiction and the challenges that presented, and her editing, with Daisy Hernández, the groundbreaking anthology Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism  (which they have recently updated).