Pireeni Sundaralingam

Photo by Ann Townsend

Pireeni Sundaralingam is a cognitive scientist and poet. Educated at Oxford, her poems appear in over thirty journals and have been translated into five languages. She is a Fellow at the Exploratorium, a Salzburg Global Fellow, and Principal Advisor on Human Potential for UN Live, the Museum for the United Nations, where she leads research on issues such as climate change engagement. She is currently writing a book of lyric essays about the brain.

Summer 2019

A “Clarion Call to Action”: Nine Recommended Books on Climate Change

While the rapidly evolving nature of climate change means that the best sources of current data are online (e.g., United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and National Oceanic and...
November 2016

What to Read Now: Imagination and the Environment

In an era in which we spend an increasing number of our waking hours immersed in virtual and augmented realities, gliding across the two-dimensional surfaces of a placeless digital world, it is perhap...
Language Like Birds

Nov. 2008 WLT It is Paris, Berlin, New York, it is any one of countless cities, any one of endless lands in which we find ourselves, our careless hurrying thro...
January 2011

Science and Poetry: Predation or Symbiosis?

Are science and poetry inherently at odds with one another? Poet and cognitive scientist Pireeni Sundaralingam explores the nature of interactions between these two disciplines....
January 2011

Carving Out New Territories

The meeting ground between science and literature has never been so busy. Not only have the last few years seen a proliferation of anthologies such as Riffing on Strings: Creative Writing Inspired...