College Writing Programs Lecturer Tehmina Khan is interviewed by colleague Michelle Baptiste about her poetry and her teaching.
Work they read: In this episode of Berkeley Writers at Work, continuing lecturer Michelle Baptiste sits down with poet, translator, and multilingual lecturer Tehmina Khan for an intimate conversation about language, heritage, and creative expression. The episode begins with Khan reading her poem “In Memory of Al-Mutanabbi Street, Baghdad,” an elegy for the booksellers and poets lost in a 2007 car bombing. The poem becomes a starting point for a rich discussion on the power of words to survive violence, the endurance of literary history from Gilgamesh to Job, and the role of poetry as both witness and renewal.
Khan reflects on her lifelong relationship with language—her Indian-English upbringing, her studies in Urdu, Arabic, Spanish, and Chinese, and her fascination with translation as both a creative and spiritual practice. She shares her process of translating Al-Mutanabbi’s “Ode to Harun”, balancing faithfulness to meaning with poetic rhythm, and seeing translation as a dialogue across centuries rather than a fixed product.
Together, Baptiste and Khan explore how multilingualism shapes identity and pedagogy, especially in Berkeley’s writing classrooms. Khan describes inviting her students to bring their “heritage languages” into academic writing, blending personal and cultural expression in their essays. Their conversation closes with reflections on finding beauty in struggle, the wholeness in suffering, and the deep joy of hearing many languages—of love, loss, and imagination—speak through one another.
