Hi, my name is Zoya! I’m a poet, student, and reader.
I’ve always believed in the transformative power of stories and used reading as a way to better understand the human experience. When I studied English in college, I learned how to read, understand, interpret, and discuss literature in ways I never had before. These skills were often gained through discussions my classmates had as a group. When I realized that these discussions didn’t have to end in the classroom, I created zoreads to bring literary conversations to a more accessible platform.
My taste in books is broad, though some of my frequent interests are the Russian classics (Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy are my favorite authors), books that feature science and medicine (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Albert Camus’s The Plague, for example), and multigenerational family sagas (100 Years of Solitude, Pachinko, East of Eden). You can find a complete list of my favorite reads on my storygraph.
Lately, I’ve been on a journey to transform my reading habits following principles inspired by Audre Lorde: to decolonize my bookshelf and promote the notion that Poetry is Not a Luxury. I hope to consume content from a diverse range of writers and push back against elitist notions about what art is and who it’s for. I hope this blog will document my progress towards these principles and amplify them in the larger literary community.
Thank you for visiting zoreads! Feel free to get in touch with any questions, comments, and suggestions 🙂
She laughed. “But how could you live and have no story to tell? “
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights
Women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already.
Audre Lorde, Poetry is Not a Luxury
I don’t want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning.
Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red
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