Hajjar Baban has a shy smile that flickers across her face when she speaks about her work. Her voice is confident, but interrupted by long, contemplative pauses. “I’m someone who just cares a lot, maybe too much sometimes, about everything.” Then that smile makes a brief appearance. Still in her early 20s, Baban has already earned international notice for her intense and sometimes harrowing poems. Earlier this year she received a prestigious Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. In 2017, when she was still a teenager, she was…
