About
Jhani Randhawa is a non-binary Kenyan-Punjabi/Anglo-American collaborator, editor, and artist whose work is interested in environmental justice, migration and diaspora, and formations of friendship across species and consciousness. Author of Time Regime (Gaudy Boy, 2022), which won the 2023 California Book Award for Poetry, and co-founding editor of the experimental arts project rivulet, Jhani has studied at Sarah Lawrence College, the California Institute of Integral Studies, Upaya Zen Center and Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, and has participated in artist and focus residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Writers House Pittsburgh, Millay Arts, and the Wormfarm Institute. The recipient of a Yasmin Fellowship, a Richard Bonney Literary Fund grant, and a Laura Bassi Foundation scholarship, Jhani is a 2023–2024 Postcolonial Studies masters student at SOAS, University of London.
Featured Work
Time Regime: Poems

“This book is a rare page-turner that demands radical inclusivity from the breath of a brilliant writer. These pages wrangle with the divergent tools to awaken everyone who dares to be part of the poet’s experiment.”
—CAConrad, poet, AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration
A collection of experiments, mechanical dream logs, epistolaries, and field notes, Time Regime (April 2022, Gaudy Boy) — winner of the 2021 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize — assembles an emergent mutant body intent on interrupting neoliberal imperialism’s rhythms and expectations.
Disassembling and reassembling the marginalized body through the intersecting lenses of ecofeminism and necrosociality, the poems in Time Regime form a poetic fugue that defies regimes of purity and correctness, in an historical epoch demarcated by violence, discipline, and erasure. Time Regime traces the lives, ecological contexts, and dreams of multiple beings— rice germ, red ticks, a grandmother’s skin cells, limestone deposits, machine intelligence, shaggy language, the poet, no-self, or the mythological winged cow Surabhi—as they collide and float in parallel vectors. Displaced and seeking, these spectral and material bodies erode and recombine at the edges of domestic ruin, ecological collapse, and state-sanctioned death, delivering an image of presence that seeks communion with mess.
In their transcending debut, Jhani Randhawa posits an alternative figuration for the post-modern self—one untethered by oppressive regimes marked by systems of silence—and gives us a body that transforms itself into a site of resistance by bearing witness to our living.
Other Works
Awards and Recognition
- California Book Awards Gold Medal Winner for Poetry, 2023
- Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize Winner, 2021