Manav Sachdeva Maasoom is an international poet and diplomat, and has worked or traveled through nearly 45 countries. He has worked on an Afghan film (Camp Victory) as a subtitle interpreter and editor, and written a book, “The Sufi’s Garland”, dedicated to his time in Afghanistan. He speaks Dari, some Pashto, Urdu, Panjabi, Hindi, English, and some Russian, Spanish, and French. Maasoom worked with the United Nations and other international NGOs and development bodies over the last two decades. Maasoom was born in India and currently lives in Kyrgyzstan while calling the US his permanent home base for now. Maasoom studied Poetry and Policy Studies at Columbia University for his Master of International Affairs, studied Comparative Literature and Politics for his Harvard Olympia Summer Program in Greece, and studied biology and liberal studies as part of the Biomed Premed studies at University of California at Riverside. Maasoom is the Luce Foundation Poet Laureate for the US for 2015, is 38 years of age, and is married to a wonderful young princess from Tashkent, Nigora, who also lived a similar life of studying at Columbia University, working at the UN, and is a wonderful photographer. They have two children so far, a boy and a girl. Maasoom loves all art and music, studied Afghan Rubaab stringed instrument in Kabul, and loves to play Rubaab. His dream is to some day open a studio with each corner dedicated to one of his loves…a corner for international cooking, a corner with a beautiful writing desk, a corner with paints and easel and canvases, a corner with musical instruments, middle of corners for more arts and expressions, and a center for crafting and moulding and shaping things out of clay.