Creative Writer
Storyteller. Voice for Kazakh Women
Asyl is an avid poetry and fiction nerd. As a poet, she hearts forms; she translates her obsessions into sestinas, bends the power of words through erasures, and bridges conflict through her invention of the haikuntrapuntal. As a fiction writer, she explores survival, familial tensions, and resistance through her Kazakh and post-Soviet cultural lens.
Her literary mission is to champion writing as a healing tool and craft a truthful, intimate, yet global portrait of Kazakh womanhood.
Upcoming projects include:
The Haikuntrapuntal Bridge: a Chapbook of Poems (July 2025)
A Poetic Workbook for Bridge-Builders (October 2025)
Stubborn Little Thing: HiStories of Kazakh Women (December 2025)
The Haikuntrapuntal
emerges from two rich poetic traditions:
Haiku: A Japanese poetic form focused on seasonal observation, impermanence (mujō), and the beauty of the ephemeral. The haiku values silence, implication, and natural imagery.
Contrapuntal Poetry: A Western innovation often used in formal experimentation and dialogic structure. Contrapuntal poems demand dual readability and often explore multiplicity, duality, or contradiction.
By hybridizing these traditions, the haikuntrapuntal functions as a formal metaphor for cultural negotiation—melding East and West, minimalism and multiplicity, serenity and confrontation… One of the form’s defining ethical principles is the necessity of understanding opposing viewpoints—not to justify them, but to humanize them.
“Even if you disagree with one of the perspectives you’re writing from, you still need to understand it. You don’t have to agree, but you need to understand.”
Asyl Ospan
Background music: Let’s Celebrate, Musician: Music_Unlimited
Breaking name / Breaking Tongue (reading a Haikuntrapuntal bridge)
Live Readings
Why do we dehumanize (excerpt from the craft essay)
Mother/Daughter (reading a Haikuntrapuntal Bridge)