Pireeni Sundaralingham has been named one of America's Emerging Writers. Her poetry examines the multi-faceted aspects of exile - and of the ways in which community may be found within the situation of exile.
Her poems in "Margin Lands" move from fragmented personal memories of censorship and genocide in Sri Lanka to universal images of immigration and repatriation in the West. There are also poems
about Prague, Croatia, Ireland and Iran, about friends who fled from
the shadows of other concentration camps and cruelties.

She has read widely in venues throughout the US and Europe. She was invited to read her work in lieu of the presidential keynote address at the National Literary Awards ceremony and Irish poet Pearse Hutchinson paid tribute to her work, choosing to read two of her pieces together with his own writing at the opening of the Sligo Poetry Festival in Ireland.

Some of Pireeni's awards include the Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize, a Zellerbach grant and the Rosenthal Fellowship. Her work has been published ithroughout England, Ireland and the USA, including Ploughshares and The Progressive.

Born in Sri Lanka and educated at Oxford, Pireeni currently lives in
San Francisco and in her spare time, is a cognitive scientist.