Yena Sharma Purmasir is a poet and essayist from New York City. She is the author of Until I Learned What It Meant (Where Are You Press, 2013) and When I’m Not There (self-published, 2016), Our Synonyms: An Epic (Party Trick Press, 2022), and VIRAHA (Game Over Books, 2022). In 2025, her work appeared in Killing the Buddha, Scalawag, and MENACE Magazine. She is the 2026 Voices of Color Fellow at the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Yena holds a master’s degree in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School, where she focused on South Asian religious traditions. She is also the co-founder of Whipsmart, a writing app built for creative writers. As a lifelong New York snob and the 2010–2011 Queens Teen Poet Laureate, Yena now happily lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is almost always writing about god.