Waqas Khwaja

Waqas Khwaja is the Ellen Douglass Leyburn Professor of English at Agnes Scott College where he teaches courses in Postcolonial literature, British Romanticism, Narratives of Empire, Gothic literature, Victorian poetry and fiction, Literature and Leadership, and Creative Writing. He has a Ph.D. in English from Emory University and a law degree (LL.B.) from the Punjab University Law College, Lahore. Khwaja has published four collections of poetry, Hold Your Breath, No One Waits for the Train, Mariam’s Lament, and Six Geese from a Tomb at Medum, as well as a literary travelogue, Writers and Landscapes, about his experiences as a fellow of the International Writers Program, University of Iowa, and three edited anthologies of Pakistani literature, Cactus, Mornings in the Wilderness, and Short Stories from Pakistan. He served as translation editor (and contributor) for Modern Poetry of Pakistan, a project jointly sponsored by the National Endowment of the Arts and the Pakistan Academy of Letters, which showcases the work of 44 poets from seven of Pakistan’s local and regional languages and has guest-edited a special issue of scholarly articles on Pakistani Literature for the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies.

A regular contributor to The Frontier Post, The Pakistan Economic Review, The Pakistan Times, News International, The Nation, and The Friday Times between 1983 and 1992, Khwaja was a practicing lawyer and visiting professor of law in Pakistan before migrating to the U.S. in 1994. He has published articles and essays on writers from a variety of linguistic and cultural traditions and on subjects as wide-ranging as literature and economics, history, culture, and politics. A special issue on Pakistani poetry that he guest-edited for Atlanta Review was released in Spring 2014. His poems and translations have appeared in US, Pakistani, European, and Far Eastern publications, literary journals, and anthologies.

A recipient of special recognition for outstanding creative writing from the South Asian Literary Society (SALA), USA, (2017), and Orient-Occident Arts Laureate award from the Fundația Academia Internațională Orient-Occident, Curtea de Argeș, Romania (2021), among other honors, Khwaja regularly organizes poetry readings for social and political causes and arranges open public readings annually at Agnes Scott College as part of the international “100 Thousand Poets for Change” project.