Perceptive, honest and a bit of a perfectionist, Areej Siddiqui serves as the Poetry Editor for TMS. Meaning? Impress her, and you’re golden.
Areej Siddiqui was a secretly wild child born and raised in the vast deserts of Saudi Arabia. Her parents, assuming her to be an unobtrusive, intelligent little thing, encouraged reading and other artistic pursuits. She grew up reading the Ladybug reading series, and after that, copious amounts of Fear Street and Goosebumps that her parents did not encourage. She began writing prose in the 6th grade but transitioned swiftly to poetry at the age of thirteen, when an year-long childhood crush failed to remain crushable. Predictably, her poetry was not very good.
Areej soon found an online community of writers who honed and polished her secret wildness – the wildness she had all but forgotten in her journey from toddlerhood to the teen years. Such is social conditioning.
Fatefully, Areej’s creativity was unleashed, as is with all secretly hidden things. Anyone who has read “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” would know. Ever since, Areej has given up all attempts to hide her undeniable talent. She spends nights writing by torch-light and days trying to decipher her midnight scrawl.
Being Poetry Editor of TMS, Areej must bring together her Jekyll and Hyde in a somewhat harmonious singularity, simultaneously wild and socially adept. In this position Areej hopes to find deep, labyrinthine creations, poems that display an unbridled, chaotic sensitivity to the secretly wild energy in this world around us. She hopes to find poems and poets that are engulfed by it. And to show the conversely numb, zombie-eyed civilization that real life exists.