Bushra Rehman's novel celebrates the Pakistani American community in 1980s Corona, 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. Bushra 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 ground-breaking anthology Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism  (which they have recently updated).