Alumni Spotlight: Tenzin Dickie ’14

The Alumni Spotlight is a place to hear from the School of the Arts alumni community about their journeys as artists and creators.

Tenzin Dickie ’14 is a writer, translator, and editor. She is editor of Old Demons, New Deities: Twenty One Short Stories from Tibet (O/R Books, 2017) and The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays (Penguin India, 2023). An excerpt from the Penguin Book can be read on LitHub. Her writing has been anthologized in Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians published by the Indian Academy of Letters, Under the Blue Skies: A Tibetan Reader by Blackneck Books, and The Tibet Reader, forthcoming from Duke University Press. She is a former Fulbright fellow, and currently works as Communications Officer at Harvard Library, Harvard University. 



Was there a specific faculty member or peer who especially inspired you while at the School of the Arts? If so, who and how?

I just loved my translation classes with Susan Bernofsky so much that I started out as Fiction and ended up doing Fiction and Literary Translation. Studying with her and translating in her classes felt like a sort of apprenticeship in the art and craft of translation. I mean, Susan Bernofsky is like the guru of translation.  And it's not just her insight and her brilliance—her wild ability to infer creative solutions to knotty translation problems—but also her care and concern for her students, which was so inspiring. In her translation workshops and seminars, it became clear to me that this grappling between the poetry of different languages—in my case Tibetan and English—was something I wanted to keep doing in one form or another all my life. I had great fiction workshop teachers too, of course, Donald Antrim, Stacey D'Erasmo, Paul Beatty. SOA has an overflow of talent because your backyard is NYC.

How did attending the School of the Arts impact your work and career as an artist?

I think attending the School of the Arts at Columbia made it possible for me to always be a working artist. By which I mean, I always had/have a full time job but the importance of art, of this pursuit in my life, was pretty clear and not really negotiable. At SOA, I was surrounded by all these people for whom artistic practice was non-negotiable. That's an incredibly empowering and anti-capitalist bubble to live, study, practice in for three years. It still feels like some kind of crazy early investment that I got in on the ground floor of, like there's been some compounding of artistic capital which I am still living off of. I come from a Tibetan refugee family, and yet I never considered the economics of a post-university artistic degree. Which perhaps might strike some as damning, but to me this was incredibly freeing. My MFA years provided the cultural and intellectual ballast which sustains my writing and literary practice.

What advice would you give to recent graduates? 

I'll give some very specific advice, which may not be the best idea but whatever. For recent graduates in Writing without family money who need a job, please look at the field of Communications! It's a whole discipline, an entire industry, and you might find your right job there. I looked at the publishing industry and nonprofit etc., and never once considered Communications. I only came around to Comms later, and belatedly learned what a great fit it was for a day job for me. Keep writing, keep making art. Easier said than done, I know.