Inaugural Literary Festival of the Indian Subcontinent




The Indo American Arts Council in collaboration with The South Asia Institute, Columbia University & India Abroad

FIRST ANNUAL IAAC LITERARY FESTIVAL
NOVEMBER 7-9, 2014
Bios

Sir Salman Rushdie is the author of eleven novels: Grimus, Midnight’s Children* (which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown and The Enchantress of Florence, and Luka and the Fire of Life. He is also the author of a book of stories, East, West, and three works of non-fiction – Imaginary Homelands, The Jaguar Smile, and Step Across This Line. He is the co-editor of Mirrorwork,* an anthology of contemporary Indian writing, and of the 2008 Best American Short Stories anthology. He has adapted Midnight’s Children for the stage. It was performed in London and New York by the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 2004, an opera based upon Haroun and the Sea of Stories was premiered by the New York City Opera at Lincoln Center. A Fellow of the British Royal Society of Literature, Sir Salman Rushdie has received, among other honours, the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel (twice), the Writers’ Guild Award, the James Tait Black Prize, the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature, Author of the Year Prizes in both Britain and Germany, the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature, the Premio Grinzane Cavour in Italy, the Crossword Book Award in India, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the London International Writers’ Award, the James Joyce award of University College Dublin, the St Louis Literary Prize, the Carl Sandburg Prize of the Chicago Public Library, and a U.S. National Arts Award. He holds honorary doctorates and fellowships at six European and six American universities, is an Honorary Professor in the Humanities at M.I.T, and University Distinguished Professor at Emory University. He has received the Freedom of the City in Mexico City, Strasbourg and El Paso, and the Edgerton Prize of the American Civil Liberties Union. He holds the rank of Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres – France’s highest artistic honour. Between 2004 and 2006 he served as President of PEN American Center, and continues to work as Chairman of the PEN World Voices International Literary Festival, which he helped to create. In June 2007 he received a Knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. In 2008 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named a Library Lion of the New York Public Library. In addition, Midnight’s Children was named the Best of the Booker – the best winner in the award’s 40 year history – by a public vote.


Akeel Bilgrami got his first degree in English Literature at Elphinstone College, Bombay and then went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar for another Bachelor's degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He has a Ph.D in Philosophy from the University of Chicago. He is the Sidney Morgenbesser Chair of Philosophy at Columbia University, as well as a Professor in the Committee on Global Thought as well as the Director of the South Asian Institute there. His publications include Belief and Meaning (Wiley, 1992), Self-Knowledge and Resentment (Harvard, 2006), Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (Harvard, 2014).


Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of ‘Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found,’ which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. He has won the Whiting Writers’ Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehta’s work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harper’s Magazine, Time, and Newsweek, and has been featured on NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’ and ‘All Things Considered.’ Mehta is an Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University. He is currently working on a nonfiction book about immigrants in contemporary New York, for which he was awarded a 2007 Guggenheim fellowship. He has also written original screenplays for films, including ‘New York, I Love You.’ Mehta was born in Calcutta and raised in Bombay and New York. He is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.


Kalyan Ray grew up in Calcutta after his family was uprooted from the Ganges Delta (now Bangladesh) through a combination of political upheavals, natural disasters, and poverty. Educated in India and the U.S., he has lived and taught in Ireland, Greece, Ecuador, Jamaica, and the Philippines, and currently divides his time between the U.S. and Kolkata. He is the author of Eastwords, and has translated several books of contemporary Indian poetry into English. He is married to acclaimed Indian film director and actress Aparna Sen.


K. Anis Ahmed is a Bangladeshi writer based in Dhaka. He is a co-founder of Bengal Lights, Bangladesh\'s most prominent new English literary journal. His first book of short stories, Good Night, Mr. Kissinger, was released in Bangladesh by UPL in November 2012. It was released in the USA in March 2014 and in the UK in June 2014 by The Unnamed Press. His first novel, The World in My Hands, was published in December 2013 by Vintage / Random House India. His first published story, \"Forty Steps,\" appeared in the Minnesota Review (Spring 2000), alongside pieces by Carlos Fuentes and William Gass, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Ahmed studied at Brown, Washington and New York Universities before returning to Bangladesh in 2004. In the US, Ahmed studied with Edmund White and Stanley Elkin, among others. He lives in Dhaka with his wife and son.


Arun Venugopal is the creator and host of Micropolis, WNYC Radio's ongoing series examining race, street life and urban identity. His work has regularly appeared on NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered as well as On the Media and Studio 360. He's written for Salon and the Wall Street Journal and has been interviewed by the New York Times, the Associated Press and PBS Newshour.


Rajika Bhandari, writer and researcher, is the author of the nonfiction historical and travel book, The Raj on the Move: Story of the Dak Bungalow. Her writing has appeared in National Geographic Traveler, Passion Fruit: A Women’s Travel Journal, India Currents magazine, Man’s World magazine, InCulture Parent, The Guardian, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Times Higher Ed, and The Huffington Post. Rajika is also the author of five books on international education, including two on Asia. Originally from New Delhi, India, she currently lives in New York City.


Sujata Massey is the author of 12 books published in 15 countries. Born in England to parents from India and Germany, she grew up mostly in Saint Paul, MN. After graduating from the Johns Hopkins University, Sujata worked for five years as a newspaper journalist at the Baltimore Evening Sun before marrying and moving to Asia to begin her dream career as a novelist. Sujata's mystery series set in Japan and featuring the sleuth Rei Shimura has won the Agatha and Macavity awards and been shortlisted for the Edgar, Anthony and Mary Higgins Clark awards. In 2013, Sujata's first historical novel set in India, The Sleeping Dictionary, was published in the United States. Foreign rights were sold to publishers in India, Italy and Turkey. BOOKLIST called it "an utterly engrossing tale of love, espionage, betrayal and survival...historical fiction at its best."


Kenizé Mourad is a French journalist, foreign affairs and war correspondent, historian, and novelist. The orphaned daughter of the Turkish Ottoman princess Selma (a grand-daughter of Sultan Murad V), she was separated during World-War II as an infant child from her Indian Muslim father, the late Rajah of Kotwara, and was raised in Paris by foster parents and Catholic nuns. A bestselling author of international repute, her latest book “In the City of Gold and Silver” will be released in the United States on November 4, 2014.


Angana P. Chatterji is Co-chair, Armed Conflict Resolution and People’s Rights Project at the Center forNonprofit and Public Leadership, Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley. (nonprofit.haas.berkeley.edu/research/acr.html) Dr. Chatterji’s scholarship bears witness to postcolonial conditions of grief, dispossession, and agency. A cultural anthropologist and human rights specialist, Dr. Chatterji focuses her scholarly work on issues of gendered violence and reparatory justice; nationalism and minoritization; religion in the public sphere and religious freedom; and livelihood security and cultural survival. Dr. Chatterji has served on human rights commissions and offered expert testimony, including at the United Nations, European Parliament, United Kingdom Parliament, and United States Congress. In Kashmir, Chatterji co-founded, and was co-convener of (in 2008-2012), the People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice. In 2005, Chatterji founded the People’s Tribunal on Religious Freedom and Human Rights in Odisha. In 2004, Chatterji served on a two-person independent commission on displacement and rehabilitation in the Narmada Valley. In 1984, Chatterji worked in the relief camps for Sikh victims-survivors in Delhi. In 2003-2004, Chatterji was a founding member of the South Asia Feminist Preconference at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Chatterji served on the faculty in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where she co-created a graduate curriculum in postcolonial anthropology as Professor (2009-2011), Associate Professor (2000-2009), and Adjunct Professor (1997-2000). Between 1989-2002, Chatterji worked with the Indian Social Institute and Planning Commission of India, and as the Director of Research at the Asia Forest Network, initially housed at the University of California, Berkeley. Chatterji’s publications include: Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present; Narratives from Orissa (Three Essays Collective, 2009); Land and Justice: The Struggle for Cultural Survival (forthcoming); a co-edited volume, Contesting Nation: Gendered Violence in South Asia; Notes on the Postcolonial Present (Zubaan, 2012; U. Chicago, 2013); a co-contributed anthology, Kashmir (Verso, 2011); and reports for which she was lead author, entitled, BURIED EVIDENCE: Unknown, Unmarked, and Mass Graves in Kashmir (2009) and Without Land or Livelihood (2004).



“Toofani”, Hindi for "whirlwind", is an apt nickname for internationally acclaimed Indian director, screenwriter, and producer Mira Nair who is known for her visually dense films thatpulsate with life. Nair is the rare prolific filmmaker who fluidly moves between Hollywood and Independent Cinema. After several years of making documentary films, Mira Nair made a stunning entry onto the world stage with her debut feature film Salaam Bombay! (1988). Now hailed as a classic, the film has received more than 25 international awards, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 1988, the Caméra d’Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival. Her second film, Mississippi Masala (1991) won three awards at Venice. Since, Nair made films such as The Perez Family (1993), Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996), My Own Country (1998), The Laughing Club of India (1999). In 2001, Monsoon Wedding, won the Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice Film Festival, becoming one of the highest grossing foreign films of all time. Nair then directed the Golden Globe winning Hysterical Blindness (2002). After making William Makepeace Thackeray’s epic Vanity Fair (2004), she directed a film based on Jhumpa Lahiri’s best-selling novel The Namesake (2006). This was followed by the Amelia Earhart biopic, Amelia (2009) starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere. Nair is an avid maker of short films, and has contributed to 11.09.01 (2002) in which 11 renowned film-makers reacted to the events of September 11. Other titles include How Can It Be? (2008), Migration (2008), New York, I Love you (2009), and her collaboration with Emir Kusturica and Guillermo Ariaga on a compilation feature Words With God. Her latest film, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was a thriller based on the best-selling novel by Mohsin Hamid. It opened the 2012 Venice Film Festival to critical acclaim, and wasreleased worldwide in early 2013. A long time activist, Nair set up an annual film-makers’ laboratory, Maisha in Kampala, Uganda. Since 2005, young directors in East Africa have been trained at this non-profit facility with the belief that “If we don’t tell our stories, no one else will”. Maisha is currently building a school with Architect Raul Pantaleo, winner of Aga Khan Award for Architecture, and his company Studio Tamassociati. In 1988 she used the profits from Salaam Bombay! to create Salaam Balak Trust which works with street children in India. In 2012, Mira Nair was awarded the Padma Bhushan – India’s second highest civilian honor - by the President of India.


Mohan Sikka won Best Story at the 2014 Screen Awards for the film adaption of his story “The Railway Aunty”, remade as B.A. Pass by debut director Ajay Bahl. “The Railway Aunty” was published in Delhi Noir, part of the renowned urban noir series from Akashic Books brought to India by Harper Collins. Mohan’s story “Uncle Musto Takes a Mistress” won a 2009 PEN/O. Henry Prize. Mohan's fiction and non-fiction looks at the repression and violence that lives under the surface of urban middle-class life. His work has appeared in the journal One Story, the Toronto South Asian Review, Trikone Magazine, Tehelka, Open, National Geographic Traveller (India), and in anthologies in several countries. He is working on a novel and a collection of stories based in Delhi.


Nandita Das wears many hats and her fiery passion to make a difference is evident in the choices she has made, both professionally and personally. She has acted in over 40 feature films in 10 Indian languages, and in three professional plays. She directed her debut feature, Firaaq, in 2008 that won her much appreciation and accolades in India and abroad. After her Masters in Social Work, she continues to advocate issues of social justice and human rights. Between the Lines marks her debut as a playwright and theatre director. She writes a monthly column called the Last Word, for a national weekly. She was the Chairperson of the Children’s Film Society, India, where she made many big and small changes to revamp the organization. She was on the jury of Cannes Film Festival twice (2005 and 2013). The French Government conferred her with the Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters (Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres), their prestigious civilian award. In 2011 Nandita Das was the first Indian to be inducted into the Hall of Fame of the International Women’s Forum. Nandita is currently a Yale World Fellow 2014, for a 4 month Fellowship, among 16 other emerging global leaders who were chosen from close to 4000 applicants. The mission of the fellowship is to cultivate and empower a network of globallyengaged leaders committed to positive change through dialogue and action.


Vibhuti Patel In her 30 years with Newsweek, Vibhuti Patel wrote on arts and culture, interviewed celebrities for the International magazine's backpage, reported cover stories, edited the Letters column and co-anchored the weekly radio show, Newsweek On Air. Outside Newsweek, Vibhuti was a long-time columnist for The Earth Times, published from the U.N. She has freelanced for The Times of India, India Today and Outlook magazine. The New York Times ran her op-ed on Bombay’s 1993 Hindu-Muslim riots. John Kenneth Galbraith wrote the introduction to her book "Mrs. Kennedy Goes Abroad," on miniature paintings depicting the First Lady’s trip to India. She has taught Modern Indian Literature at universities in Doha, Qatar, Cairo, Egypt, and in New York City. Since retiring from Newsweek as Contributing Editor, Vibhuti has been writing for the Wall St. Journal and freelancing for The Hindu and Indian Quarterly.


Mahmood Mamdani has been the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the Departments of Anthropology and International Affairs, and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1974 and specializes in the study of African history and politics. His works explore the intersection between politics and culture, a comparative study of colonialism since 1452, the history of civil war and genocide in Africa, the Cold War and the War on Terror, and the history and theory of human rights. His books include Citizen and Subject, When Victims Become Killers and Good Muslim Bad Muslim: America, The Cold War, and the Roots of Terror.



Gary Bass is the author of The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in general nonfiction and won the Lionel Gelber Prize; Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention; and Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals. He is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University. A former reporter for The Economist, he has written often for the New York Times, and has also written for The New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, The New Republic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Slate, and other publications.



Neil Padukone is the author of "Beyond South Asia: India’s Strategic Evolution and the Reintegration of the Subcontinent" (Bloomsbury, 2014). He is a former Public Service Fellow at the Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and a geopolitics fellow at the Takshashila Institution. A former foreign affairs columnist for the Christian Science Monitor and South Asia commentator at Russia Today News, Neil’s work has been published in The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, the Journal of International Affairs, Newsweek’s Daily Beast, The National Interest, South Asian Survey, the World Affairs Journal, the Huffington Post, and the Economic and Political Weekly, among others.


Jaya Kamlani is an Atlanta based non-fiction author and social advocate. Her debut non-fiction book, “To India, with Tough Love” (2013) was written to promote public awareness of social, economic and environmental issues impacting India as well as sustainable solutions which can be adapted in the country and across the globe. Other books include her recently published memoir, “Scent of Yesterday” (2014) and her upcoming poetry collection (2015). Prior to her writing career, Jaya was a senior technology consultant in Silicon Valley and graduate of St. Xavier's College, Mumbai. For more info, visit www.jayakamlani.com


Aladdin Ullah - As inaugural member of the Public Theater's Emerging Writers Group, Aladdin has been been developing his soloshow Dishwasher Dreams which has been in festivals/workshops such as: New Works Now! At the Public Theater, New York theater workshop, New York Stage and Film, Chicago’s Victory Gardens, Cape Cod Theater Fest, Silk Road, Shakespeare in Paradise Fest in the Bahamas. He was the IAAC (Indo-American Arts Council) Playwright in resident at the Lark Play Development Center and resident playwright at New York Theater Workshop. His play the Halal Brothers was featured in the Labyrinth’s Barn Series at the Public Theater directed by Liesl Tommy and the Lab’s summer Workshop led by John Ortiz. It was also part of the 2010 Classical Theater of Harlem’s Future Classic Reading Series directed by Christopher McElroen at the Shomburg in Harlem. He is the recipient of the 2012 LMCC (Lower Manhattan Cultural Council) playwrighting grant and The Paul Robeson Development Grant. A recent book based on Aladdin's journey to research his father for the solo play was made into a critically acclaimed book called Bengali Harlem written by Vivek Bald and published by Harvard Press. (Bengaliharlem.com). A documentary is currently in production as well and you can see a clip of it online (http://bengaliharlem.com/?p=24) A recent interview on NPR highlights that journey: http://www.thestory.org/stories/2013-05/bengali-harlem As a comedian trailblazing the way for South Asians the past two decades, Aladdin has been performing all over the world as a stand-up comedian. He was one of the very first South Asians to appear as a stand up comedian on national television (Comedy Central, BET, MTV PBS etc) He has been featured in hundreds of commercials, film and tv shows displaying his wide range of characters and voices. He was the hilarious Professor Gautaum in the film American Desi. On Television he was a series regular in the cult hit Uncle Morty’s Dub Shack which won several Telly awards for comedy and writing on IATV (Imaginasian TV). His voice was recently featured as the character of Hanuman in the critically acclaimed animated film- Sita Sings the Blues which won major awards at film festivals all over the world (Tribeca, Berlin, Toronto,etc ) It was hailed by critics such as Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun times-"two thumbs up!" and A.O Scott of NY times - " a tour de force".


Paul Knox is a writer and director who lives between NYC and Mumbai. His play, Kalighat, based on his experiences working in Mother Teresa's homes in Kolkata was produced by the IAAC and published by the New York Theater Experience. His Gehri Dosti: 5 Short Plays with a South Asian Bent ;-) was seen at Harvard University, Wellesley College and in NYC at Circle East (formerly the Circle Rep Lab) where he was Executive Director. His short film, Two Men in Shoulder Stand, premiered at the IAAC and has played at festivals and NGOs around the world. Paul is a co-recipient of the UN Society of Writers' Award for his cultural exchange work with the Russian Academy of Theater Arts (GITIS). His feature screenplay, The Seaside Light, is in development with Columbus Productions in Mumbai and is shortlisted for a 2015 Sloane/Sundance Fellowship. Paul has taught at the University of Mumbai and serves on the Board of Equal Ground, an LGBT Human Rights NGO in Colombo, Sri Lanka.


Samrat Chakrabarti holds a MFA in Acting from the A.R.T/ Moscow Art Theatre School Program at Harvard University. As an actor, he has done dozens of Guest Stars and Recurring Roles on American TV shows, including: 30 Rock (NBC), In Treatment (HBO), Damages (FX), Blue Bloods (CBS), The Leftovers (HBO), The Brink (HBO), A Gifted Man (CBS), Bored To Death (HBO), Law and Order (NBC), The Sopranos (HBO) and All My Children (ABC). He has also been consistently working in films, both Hollywood and Independent, ranging from Spike Lee's She Hate Me to Amyn Kaderali's Kissing Cousins to Bruce Leddy's The Wedding Weekend to Joseph Castelo's The War Within (which was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award). He's worked on many international projects, the list includes: Deepa Mehta's film adaption of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Manish Acharya's Loins of Punjab Presents (with legendary actress Shabana Azmi), Kabir Khan's New York (produced by Yash Raj Films), Joseph Matthew's Bombay Summer and Kamal Hasaan's Vishwaroopam.


Neilesh Bose is a historian, theater artist, writer, and an assistant professor of history at St. John's University in New York City. His published academic writing explores nationalism in colonial India, Islam inmodern South Asia, decolonization, cultural history, and intellectual history in modern South Asia with a particular focus on Bengal and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. His articles on these topics have appeared in Modern Asian Studies, South Asia Research, and South Asian History and Culture, among other venues. As a theater artist and critic, his published work has appeared in TDR: The Drama Review, Theater Survey, and Asian Theatre Journal. His anthology Beyond Bollywood and Broadway: Plays from the South Asian Diaspora (Indiana UP, 2009), comprises the first book to document and investigate original plays in multiple spaces in South Asian diasporas, including South Africa, Canada, the U.S.A., and the U.K. Other books include a translation of UtpalDutt's Maanusher Adhikare, a 1969 Bengali language play about the 1930s Scottsboro trials in 1930s Alabama, co-edited with Dr. Sudipto Chatterjee (Seagull India, 2009), as well as hismonograph Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal (Oxford UP, 2014) and the edited collection Culture and Power in South Asian Islam: Defying the Perpetual Exception (Routledge, 2015). Current work includes a biography of Taraknath Das, the itinerant Bengali revolutionary and migrant in early twentieth century American spaces and a special section of TDR: The Drama Review focused on South Asian diasporic theaters jointly edited with Dr. Fawzia Afzal-Khan of Montclair State University.


Sunita Mukhi is a theater/film/performance artist, writer, cultural programs curator and an interdisciplinary performance scholar. She also writes and performs her poetry, stories, monologues that espouse the redemptive power of the arts with dynamic women as central characters. Her poems have also appeared in Contours of the Heart, Desilicious: Sexy, Subversive, South Asian, and in her own doctoral dissertation from New York University’s Performance Studies Department published by Routeledge as Doing the Desi Thing. As part of the Asia Society’s Cultural Programs Division and as the pioneering Director of the Charles B. Wang Center’s Asian/American Programming at Stony Brook University, she produced over 600 innovative programs promoting a multi-faceted, intellectually sound and humane understanding of Asianness. Also for Stony Brook University’s Asian and Asian American Studies Department she developed and taught courses on Performance, Cinema, and the South Asian Diaspora. She continues her curatorial work, arts advocacy and practice as a proud board member of the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective, and as the Artistic Director of DeviDiva Productions. She premiered her solo piece THE DEVI DIVA TRIAD as part of the prestigious United Solo Festival 2014 in Theater Row, NYC this last October.



Christopher P. Heiser - is the publisher of the Los Angeles-based Unnamed Press and Executive Director of its sister nonprofit Phoneme Media. He was deeply involved with helping start up the Los Angeles Review of Books, where he headed various aspects of marketing, communications, and development, and where he remains as an editor-at-large. Before moving to Los Angeles, he worked at The New Press and Wiley, and received an M.A. in Comparative Literature from NYU.


Amrita Chowdhury is the Country Head & Publisher of Harlequin India. She is also the author of Faking It (Hachette), an art crime thriller, and soon-to-release book Breach (Hachette), a cyber thriller, and frequently writes on lifestyle and marketing/branding issues for magazines and business newspapers. Prior to joining publishing, Amrita served as Associate Director-Education for Harvard Business School India Research Center. She has done Board Advisory and Strategy Consulting with Oppeus in Australia and AT Kearney in the US. She holds 7 US patents for semiconductor fabrication for work done at Applied Materials in California. She holds a B. Tech from IIT Kanpur, MS from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon- Tepper Business School.


Susan Shapiro, an award-winning journalism professor, has written for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Newsweek, The Nation and Salon. She's author of 9 books including Lighting Up, Only as Good as Your Word and Five Men Who Broke My Heart. The Bosnia List, a coauthored memoir, was recently published by Penguin Books. She teaches popular "instant gratification takes too long" classes at The New School, NYU, and in private workshops where she's helped 80 students sell books in the last decade. Follow her on Twitter at @susanshapironet or reach her at her website www.susanshapiro.net


Ayesha Pande has worked in the publishing industry for over twenty years. Before becoming an agent Ayesha was a senior editor at Farrar Straus & Giroux. She has also held editorial positions at HarperCollins and Crown Publishers. She is a member of AAR (Association of Author’s Representatives), PEN, the Asian American Writer’s Workshop, and sits on the advisory board of the German Book Office. She has attended numerous writing conferences including Muse and the Marketplace, Aspen Summer Words and the Miami Writer’s Institute. She has taught college level courses in editing. She holds a master’s degree from Columbia University.


Parul Sehgal is an editor at The New York Times Book Review. She was previously the books editor at NPR.org and a senior editor atPublishers Weekly. Her work has appeared in Bookforum,NewYorker.com, Tin House, Slate and The Literary Review among other publications. She is the recipient of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. She has taught at Columbia University and has spoken at the New School, NYU, Harvard University and Book Expo America. She is a regular contributor to NPR and NY1’s The Book Reader.


Amber Qureshi has been Executive Editor and Associate Publisher at Seven Stories Press, acquiring literary fiction and narrative, progressive nonfiction. She was a 2007 Editorial Fellow at the Jerusalem Book Fair and is on the American board for the Fair now, has represented her list at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the IFOA Harbourfront Toronto Writers' Festival, the Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival, the Adelaide Writers' Festival, the Sharjah International Book Fair, the Jaipur Literary Festival, and the Salon du Livres in Paris, and has taught at writers' conferences at the New School in New York City, in Asheville, North Carolina, and in Aspen, Colorado. She acquired and edited THE WHITE TIGER by Aravind Adiga, winner of the Man Booker Prize 2008. Previously at Free Press/Simon and Schuster, her first acquisition there, SONGS FOR THE BUTCHER'S DAUGHTER by Peter Manseau, won the 2009 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction; her next acquisition, HEART LIKE WATER by Joshua Clark, was nominated for a 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award; one of her last acquisitions there, THEMADONNAS OF ECHO PARK by Brando Skyhorse, has just won the PEN/Hemingway and Sue Kaufman Awards. At Picador, she acquired the Orange and Whitbreadaward-winning novel SMALL ISLAND by Andrea Levy, the NBCC award-winning VOICES FROM CHERNOBYL, THE SEAS by Samantha Hunt and three books by acclaimed Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa. As Executive Editor at Viking/Penguin, she acquired Adam Mansbach's forthcoming graffiti novel RAGE IS BACK, among other groundbreaking titles. She worked in Editorial at Alfred A. Knopf forseveral years; before that, she worked at a translation house in Tokyo, also for a number of years. Fluent in French and Japanese, she studied Pure Mathematics/Algebraic Topology as an undergraduate and as a Monbusho Scholar in the Graduate School of Chiba University, Japan. In these capacities, she has worked with such authors as Haruki Murakami, Jay McInerney,Michel Houellebecq, Jim Shepard, Matt Mason, Michel Foucault, Adam Mansbach, Virginia Postrel, Ian Thomson, Stephen Elliott, Emily Gould, Daniel Bergner, Robin Robertson, Matt Haig, and Leslie Jamison.


Vicky Bijur runs the Vicky Bijur Literary Agency, which she started in 1988. Vicky has served as president of the AAR (Association of Authors’ Representatives) and is currently chair of its Ethics Committee. She represents both fiction and nonfiction. Among her clients are NY Times bestseller Laura Lippman, whose novel EVERY SECRET THING was filmed with Dakota Fanning, Diane Lane, and Elizabeth Banks; NY Times bestseller Lisa Genova, author of STILL ALICE, now a film with Julianne Moore; James Sallis, whose novella DRIVE was the basis of the Ryan Gosling/Carey Mulligan film; Steven Greenhouse, NY Times labor reporter, now writing his second book for Knopf; food blogger Kenji Alt, whose FOOD LAB: BETTER HOME COOKING THROUGH SCIENCE will be published by Norton in 2015; NY Times bestseller Larry Gonick, author/cartoonist of THE CARTOON HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE; and Sujata Massey, author of THE SLEEPING DICTIONARY. Vicky also represents THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY: A LIFE OF THE INDIAN GENIUS RAMANUJAN by Robert Kanigel, just filmed with Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons.


Priya Doraswamy founded Lotus Lane Literary in New Jersey in May, 2013. She has been an agent for a little over five years and has sold books globally. Priya represents bestselling and award winning adult fiction and non-fiction authors. Prior to her agency career, Priya was a Deputy Attorney General, with the State of New Jersey, prosecuting securities fraud. Priya was born and raised in Bangalore and relocated to the NY area twenty four years ago, but travels to India every year for work and pleasure.


Beena Kamlani’s fiction has been published in many magazines and anthologies and won a Pushcart Prize in 2009. She is also senior editor at Viking Penguin, where she worked closely with Saul Bellow until his death in 2005, and Robert Fagles on his translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid. She taught book editing at New York University for eighteen years, and was presented the university’s award for teaching excellence in 2002. She now teaches editing for writers and editors at Hunter College. Born in India and educated in England, she has a B.A. (Hons.) and an M.A. in English and American Literature, and European Literature Since 1850.


Sharbari Ahmed's fiction has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, The Asian Pacific American Journal, Caravan and in anthologies as well as other journals. Her work has been adapted into stage plays and screenplays (by her). Her debut novel is forthcoming. She currently resides in lovely Darien, CT with her son and worries her talents will only be fully recognized after she kicks the bucket.


Renu Kurien Balakrishnan is an Indian novelist and teacher. Her first novel, Four Aleys, traces the lives of four Syrian Christian women over the first half of the twentieth century in an India changing from the old feudal ways to the new. Early last year, Renu and the students of her Creative Writing class at St Xavier’s Institute of Communication, Bombay, brought a collection of their short stories, Potluck, A Literary Collection of the Critique Group, which was well received in India. She is active in spoken English and women’s empowerment programmes in her neighborhood in Bombay, where she lives. She was educated at the Women’s Christian College, Madras and has attended creative writing classes at the New School, New York. She is at work on her second novel.



Nayana Currimbhoy is a New York based writer and journalist. She has written articles film scripts and published three works of non-fiction. Miss Timmins' School for Girls is her first novel. Nayana grew up in India, and lives now in New York City with her husband and teenage daughter.



Victor Rangel Ribeiro, the award-winning author whose debut novel, Tivolem, was named one of the twenty notable first novels to be published in America in 1998, was born in Goa, India, in 1925, when it was still a Portuguese colony; so he counts Portuguese, along with Konkani and English, as one of his three mother tongues. His short stories were first published in Bombay in the 1940s and 50s; more recently they have been featured in three top American literary magazines---the North American, Iowa, and Literary Reviews. Other pieces, including much humor, appeared in The Indian-American, the now defunct cultural magazine that for some years was published in New York. HarperCollins, India, published a collection of his short fiction, Loving Ayesha and Other Stories, in 2003, with illustrations by the celebrated Mario Miranda; it promptly made the bestseller lists in that country.



Dr. Shuvendu Sen is presently the Director of Medical Education and Associate Program Director of Internal Medicine Residency Program at Raritan Bay Medical Center, in New Jersey. Dr. Sen is also a columnist for Times of India and New Jersey Voices, The Star Ledger. Prior to these he had written and held columns for Home News Tribune, Futures magazine, The Statesman and The Guyana Times. His works of fiction and nonfiction have been published in various journals and magazines of US and UK (BBC). He has been thrice nominated for Pushcart Award for fictional and non fictional works, and is the Winner International Chapbook Competition, 2005 from Futures Magazine, MN for collection of verses titled Behind the Blue Veils. ( Editor, R C Hildebrandt)



Marina Budhos is an author of award-winning fiction and nonfiction, for both adults and young adults. Ask Me No Questions has received numerous honors, including ALA Best Books and Notable, winner of the first James Cook Teen Book Award, NY Public Library Books for the Teenage, Chicago Public Library's Best of the Best. Her most recent young adult novel, Tell Us We’re Home was praised by the New York Times as “elevated by writing that is intelligent and earnestly passionate” and is a Scholastic Book Club selection. Her nonfiction book, Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers, was re-released in 2007, and is used throughout the country in ELL classrooms, university classrooms, and as a companion text to her other works. Ms. Budhos has received an EMMA (Exceptional Merit Media Award), a Rona Jaffe Award for Women Writers, and has twice received a Fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. She has been a Fulbright Scholar to India, given talks throughout the country and abroad, and is currently an associate professor of English and Asian Studies at William Paterson University.



Vivek Bald is a scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013), and co-editor, with Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). His films include "Taxi-vala/Auto-biography," (1994) which explored the lives, struggles, and activism of New York City taxi drivers from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and "Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music" (2003) a hybrid music documentary/social documentary about South Asian youth, music, and anti-racist politics in 1970s-90s Britain. Bald is currently working on a transmedia project aimed at recovering the histories of peddlers and steamship workers from British colonial India who came to the United States under the shadows of anti-Asian immigration laws and settled within U.S. communities of color in the early 20th century. The project consists of the Bengali Harlem book as well as a documentary film, “In Search of Bengali Harlem,” (currently in production), and a digital oral history website in development at bengaliharlem.com



Balwant Bhaneja was born in Lahore and left India in 1965 for Canada. The author of five books, he has written widely on politics, science and arts. His recent works include a collaboration with Indian playwright Vijay Tendulkar, entitled Two Plays: The Cyclist and His Fifth Woman (2006) published by Oxford University Press (India), and Quest for Gandhi: A Nonkilling Journey (2011) published by the Center of Global Nonkilling, Honolulu, Hawaii. Bhaneja’s short fiction has appeared in South Asian periodicals and his plays have been produced by the BBC World Service and Toronto’s Maya Theatre at Harbourfront. He lives in Ottawa.


Johanna Lessinger is a social anthropologist and currently Distinguished Lecturer in Anthropology at John Jay College CUNY. She has done ex tensive research on gender roles and work in South India and recently published an ar ticle, “Love and Marriage in the Shadow of the Sewing Machine: case studies from Chenna i” in a volume on the modernizing contexts of marriage in South Asia. In additio n she has written about Indian- American immigrants to the U.S. Her ethnography From the Ganges to the Hudson: Indian Immigrants in New York City has been widely used i n college courses. She is a board member of the New York-based Kathak Ensemble, which pr omotes and performs Indian classical dance.



Meera Nair's debut collection, Video (NY: Pantheon 2003)received the Sixth Annual Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction and was named one of the Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post. A recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and MacDowell Colony, her work has appeared on National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts, Washington Post, the New York Times magazine as well as in The Threepenny Review, Calyx, Cura and in three anthologies. Her children's book is called Maya Saves the Day (India: Duckbill Publishing, 2013). She teaches writing at NYU in New York City and lives in Queens, NY with her husband and daughter.



Preeti Singh has worked as the head for content for Disney Publishing in India and wrote, edited and designed the Smart Beginnings Workbook program. In addition she created new content for Disney India movies in books and magazines . Preeti has worked as an Acquisitions Editor for Popular Prakashan with a mandate to set up an English Fiction List for 2011/2012 for them. Her published works include ‘Great Books for Children’ for Rupa Publishers , preschooler books for Navneet Publishers and articles on Parenting in Times of India\'s Mumbai suburban supplement, The Westside Plus. She blogs at preetiwhines.blogspot.com and is an active contributor to http://talkingcranes.com/contributor/august/2014. Preeti manages an online book review, interview and manuscript help site called thegoodbookcorner.com


Aasif Mandvi is a correspondent on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. As a writer, Mandvi is the recipient of the 1999 OBIE award for his critically acclaimed play, Sakina’s Restaurant, which was performed and conceived by Mandvi, and was adapted into the film, Today’s Special. Some of his theatre credits include the Broadway revival of Oklahoma!, as well as Homebody/Kabul, Suburbia, and Disgraced. His film credits include Premium Rush, The Proposal, The Last Airbender, The Internship, and Million Dollar Arm. Mandvi’s television credits include Jericho, Curb Your Enthusiasm, E.R, Sleeper Cell and HBO’s upcoming The Brink, on which he also serves as writer and producer. He lives and works in New York City.


Rajiv Satyal is a standup comedian from Cincinnati, Ohio, whose witty, universal, and TV-clean act resonates around the world by covering everything from racial issues to soap bottles to his favorite topic - himself. This University of Cincinnati engineer and former P&G marketer has toured with Dave Chappelle, Tim Allen, Kevin Nealon, and Russell Peters. He co-founded the world-touring Make Chai Not War, a Hindu/Muslim stand-up show that traversed seven Indian cities, sponsored by the U.S. State Dept. In August 2014, Rajiv released a video, I AM INDIAN, that went viral (200,000 YouTube hits in a week). His favorite sites in the whole wide world are facebook.com/funnyindian and rajivsatyal.com. This LA-based pocket pundit challenges people to see a new point-of-view. Most of all, he talks about what it’s like to be Rajiv. And we all have some Rajiv in us, even if we don’t want to admit it.



Rajnesh Domalpalli comes from Hyderabad, in South India. After studying Engineering at the IIT Bombay and SUNY SB in NY, he worked as a Computer En gineer in California’s Silicon Valley before joining Film School at Columbia University . His Thesis was a feature called VANAJA that won 32 International Awards including the Best First Feature at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival. It premiered at the Toronto Intl. Film Festival in 2006, and was screened in a Retrospective on Indian Cinema at the 2007 Locarno Film Festival. America\'s Pulitzer prize winning film critic, Roger Ebert, placed the film in the T op 5 Foreign Films of 2007. The New York Times called it “Absolutely Timeless” and its Scre enplay has been archived in the permanent collections of the MPAA’s Margaret Herrick L ibrary in Los Angeles. The Print is archived in the Fukuoka City Library in Japan. Rajnesh’s lat est work includes two projects. The first is a Feature Film Screenplay called AVANI, an e nvironmental fable told through the eyes of an 8 year old girl. It was selected to participate in t he Sundance/ Mumbai Mantra Screenwriting lab 2012. His second project is a young adults fantasy nove l called “Atreya and the Serpent’s Blood”.


Mara Thacker is the South Asian Studies Librarian and an assistant professor in the International and Area Studies Library at the University of Illinois. She received her BA from the College of William and Mary where she studied Literary and Cultural Studies with a focus on Indian film, and her MSLS from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where in addition to her coursework in library and information science, she also undertook intensive Hindi language training and continued her studies of Indian popular culture. She is currently putting her background in Indian popular culture to good use by building what is set to be the most comprehensive collection of South Asian comics in a North American research library.



Sudnya Shroff is an artist and writer. UNRAVELING is Sudny a's first novel. She lives in Northern California. Throughout her wide-ranging career in the fine arts, Sudnya Shroff has reached out and connected with her audience by sharing her l ife experiences and reflections through her two favorite vehicles of expression - color and words. Having received recognition in New York and California for her sensuous explorations of emotions through color, Sudnya, in her debut novel UNRAVELING, uses the written word to pa int a riveting and deeply moving portrait, taking the readers with her to culturally disparat e and geographically distant places spanning California, Singapore and India.


Pia Padukone debuts with her novel, Where Earth Meets Water, published by Harlequin Mira. Pia is a writer and a proud native of New York. At the age of 12, Pia won the Barnard College Young Women’s Writing Award. A finalist in Seventeen Magazine’s Fiction Writing Contest, and most recently a winner of the Women on Writing Flash Fiction Contest. Pia derives much literary inspiration from the world around her. Pia has written for Star News, Associated Press (UK). She and her husband Rohit, maintain a reading and eating blog, Two Admirable Pleasures. She is currently writing her second novel about two families that meet through a student exchange program and will also be published by Harlequin Mira. Visit Pia Padukone at www.PiaPadukone.com on Twitter @PiaPadukone and on www.facebook.com/PiaPadukoneauthor


Suman Bhattacharya has established himself as one of the most loved young writers of recent times in India. With almost 400 thousand followers on Fa cebook ( www.facebook.com/errorcodelove ) he enjoys a huge number of global followers from UK, USA, Asia and Africa. His debut novel “Error Code Love” has gained popularity since its release in India and the first edition is already sold out. K nown to be writing for, about and around youth, Suman Bhattacharya is termed as the voice of n ew-age youth in social media. Suman has written for Times, Asian Age, Mid-Day and other notice able publications as a freelance journalist. Known for his witty, trendy yet relevant write ups, Suman works in Adobe systems, USA as a Computer scientist. In his own words : “I work for a nice meal at lunch. I write for a peaceful sleep after dinner.”


Falguni Kothari is a New York-based Indian novelist and the author of It’s Your Move, Wordfreak! (2012), Bootie and the Beast (2014) and Scrabbulous Impressions, a short story published in Femina Magazine, India. She came in third place for the Great Beginnings contest hosted by the Wisconsin Romance Writers’ Chapter for her story, Karna: The Age of Kali. More at www.falgunikothari.com


Soniah Kamal is the 2014 Paul Bowles Fiction Fellow at Georgia State University (MFA) as well as Fiction Assistant Editor for GSU’s acclaimed publication Five Points: A Journal of Arts and Literature where she is the founder and curator of the interview series “Off The Beaten Road”. Soniah is the recipient of the Susan B. Irene Award from St. Johns College for her thesis on Arranged vs Love Marriages. Soniah is the guest editor and curator of the special South Asian Issue of Sugar Mule: A Literary Magazine: “No Place Like Home: Borders, Boundaries and Identity in South Asia and Diaspora” in which she showcased the poetry, memoir and fiction of 47 South Asian writers. Soniah’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cosmopolitan, The Rumpus, Pank, Huffington Post, Akashic Thursdaze, xoJane, SAMAR, Bengal Lights, Chowrangi, ArtsATL and more. Her shorts stories and essays are in the anthologies A Letter from India: Contemporary Short Stories from Pakistan; Neither Night Nor Day: 13 stories from Women Writers from Pakistan; And the World Changed : Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women; Madonna and Me: Women Writers on the Queen of Pop; Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women of War, Faith and Sexuality and more. Soniah grew up in England, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and lives in the US. An Isolated Incident is her debut novel.


Anjali Mitter Duva is a writer who grew up in France with family roots in Calcutta. She was educated at Brown University and MIT, and worked for some years as an urban planner. Her debut novel, Faint Promise of Rain, comes out in October 2014. She is also a co-founder of Chhandika, a non-profit organization dedicated to kathak dance, a classical storytelling art form.


Rajdeep Paulus decided to be a writer during her junior year in high school after her English teacher gave her an “F” but told her she had potential. She studied English Literature at Northwestern University and currently lives in New York with her Sunshine and four princesses where she writes Masala-marinated Young Adult Fiction.


Elizabeth Enslin is the author of While the Gods Were Sleeping: A Journey Through Love and Rebellion in Nepal (Seal Press, September 2014). She received her Ph.D from Stanford University in 1990 and carried out research in Nepal with funding from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Her creative nonfiction and poetry appear in The Gettysburg Review, Crab Orchard Review, The High Desert Journal, The Raven Chronicles, Opium Magazine and In Posse Review. Recognition includes an Individual Artist Fellowship Award from the Oregon Arts Commission, an Honorable Mention for the Pushcart Prize, a Notable for Best American Essays and a Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship in Nonfiction to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She serves on the governing boards of Fishtrap (“writing in and about The West) and Slow Food Wallowas and assists Prescott College as an occasional graduate mentor and thesis reader. She lives in a strawbale house in the canyon country of northeastern Oregon, where she raises garlic, pigs and yaks.

Los Angeles-based writer-director-producer, Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla was born in Kenya where he sold his first article to a national magazine at the age of 13. He has since written for various national magazines and his literary and film work have been celebrated at MIT (2004), IAAC (2009, 2012) and at the prestigious Master's Tea at Yale (2011). Dhalla's critically acclaimed debut novel, "Ode to Lata" was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "an achievement" and by Library Journal as "brilliant." In 2008, Dhalla adapted, produced and co-directed his novel into the motion picture "The Ode." Dhalla's second novel, "The Two Krishnas" (AKA "The Exiles" in India) has been praised as "exquisite" by best-selling author Lisa See and "riveting" by lit icon, Andrew Holleran. Dhalla's second film, "Embrace" which he wrote, produced and directed, is part of a trilogy, and the first ever dramatization of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.


Rakesh Satyal is the author of the novel Blue Boy, a ge nder-bending comedy about a queer Indian American boy who thinks that he may be the reinc arnation of Krishna. Blue Boy was the winner of a Lambda Award and the Prose/Poetry Award from the Association of Asian American Studies and is now taught at high schools and col leges worldwide. Satyal also earned a 2010 Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His short stories and essays have been widely anthologized, and he has written about pop culture for a variety of places, from Out Magazine to New York Magazine. For ten years, he was a book editor, first at Random House and HarperCollins, and worked with a wide varie ty of bestselling authors and debut novelists. Satyal also sings a popular cabaret show that has been featured prominently, from Page Six to The New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn.


Mashuq Deen is a Brooklyn-based theater artist. Deen is also an activist for the South Asian LGBTQ community, and does a lot of work for transgender inclusion and advocacy both in NYC and in collaboration with national and international organizations. He teaches writing workshops and trains community support group facilitators. He has a number of hobbies, which include baking bread, birthing stuffed monsters, and woodworking.


Kirun Kapur grew up in Hawaii and has since lived and worked in North America and South Asia. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Poetry International, FIELD, The Christian Science Monitor and many other journals and news outlets. She has taught c reative writing at Boston University and has been awarded fellowships by The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center and McDowell Colony. Kirun is the winner of the 2012 Arts & Letters/Rumi Prize for Poetry and the 2013 Antivenom priz e for her first book, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist . She is co-director of the popular Boston-area arts pro gram The Tannery Series and is poetry editor at The Drum. Find out more at www.kirunkapur.com.


Purvi Shah furthers the art of transformation as a wri ter, non-profit consultant, and anti-violence advocate. Author of the award-winning poetry collection, Ter rain Tracks, she is the winner of the inaugural SONY South Asian Social Service Excellence Awar d for her community leadership fighting violence against women. Recently, she shared her poetry at anti-violence conferences and a vigil against sexual violence. She shows creative e ngagement enables dialogue & change and that art is an essential part of our sacred space. H er book of poetry, Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press 2006), garnered the Many Voices Project prize a nd was nominated for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Members’ Choice Award. In 2013, she was selected as a Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow and her work was nominated fo r a Pushcart Prize. In 2011, she served as the Artistic Director for Together We Are N ew York: Asian Americans Remember and Re-Vision 9/11, a community-based poetry project to highligh t the voices of Asian Americans during the 10th anniversary of 9/11. In 2010, she received a Jerome Foundation Travel & Study Grant to explore sound vibration in Sanskrit and sound ener gy in poetry in English. She loves a mean pecan pie and time in city parks. Find her work at http://purvipoets.net or @PurviPoets.


Manav Sachdeva Maasoom has been writing poetry since h e was eleven. His first poem appeared in The Tribune when he was just twelve years old. A Co lumbia University Master's graduate in Poetry and Policy Studies with a certificate from Har vard Summer Olympia Program in Comparative Literature and European Studies, Maasoom now l ives in Kyrgyzstan and works for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (O SCE) and previously worked with the United Nations. The Sufi's Garland is his debut book. The Sufi's Garland is dedicated to his lifetime inspiration Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, Emily Dic kinson, and Antonio Porschia.


Ahsan Akbar grew up in Dhaka and studied at Exeter. He curre ntly lives in London, and is at work on a novel. His debut collection of poems, The De vil\'s Thumbprint, was launched at the 2014 edition of Hay Festival Dhaka. He reviews for The Dh aka Tribune, The Daily Star, The Telegraph, 3 Quarks Daily, and recently curated literary pr ojects with Granta and Wasafiri


Yena Sharma Purmasir is a 22 year old writer and poet. Bo rn and raised in New York City, Purmasir\'s work has been featured in several literary magazines, including The Freshet, published by the Fresh Meadow Poets, and Kalyani Magazine, whi le also appearing in cultural newsletters, like India Abroad. Her poems are regularly featured on the Where Are You Press tumblr page. She held the title of Queens Teen Poet Laurea te for the 2010-2011 calendar year. Her first book of poetry, Until I Learned What It Meant , was published by Where Are You Press in 2013. Purmasir graduated from Swarthmore College in 2014, where she majored in Psychology and double minored in English Literature and Re ligion Studies. She is currently engaging in a year\'s worth of service in the New York City Civic Corps program, working as the Volunteer Coordinator at Hour Children, Inc. She hopes to return to the world of academia to pursue a doctorate degree in Clinical Psychology in the v ery near future


Ravi Shankar is the founding editor and Executive Director of Drunken Boat, one of the world’s oldest electronic journals of the arts. He has published or edited seven books and chapbooks of poetry, including the 2010 National Poetry Review Prize winner, Deepening Groove. Along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he edited W.W. Norton’s Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond, called “a beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. He has won a Pushcart Prize, been featured in The New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education, appeared as a commentator on the BBC and NPR, received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and has performed his work around the world. He is currently Chairman of the Connecticut Young Writers Trust, on the faculty of the first international MFA Program at City University of Hong Kong and a Professor of English at CCSU.


Sree Sreenivasan (@sree) is the first Chief Digital O fficer at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the Met, he leads a 70-person world-class team on topic s he loves: digital, social, mobile, video, apps, email, interactives, data and more. He joined t he Met in 2013 after spending 20+ years at Columbia University as a full-time professor at Columbia Journalism School and a year as the university's first Chief Digital Officer. In 2009, h e was named one of AdAge's 25 media people to follow on Twitter; in 2010 was named one of Poynte r's 35 most influential people in social media; and in 2014, was named one of the most influe ntial Chief Digital Officers by CDO Club. You can find him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sree and and on the web at http://sree.net


Rashmee Roshan Lall has lived and worked in six countries in the last six years. She was most recently in Haiti, the world’s first inde pendent black republic and the second country after the United States to throw off the yoke o f colonialism. From Haiti, she wrote for The Guardian, The Economist, Christian Science Monito r and Foreign Policy, among other outlets. Before that, she was in Afghanistan. Rashmee started with The Times of India newspaper in D elhi, made a foray into publishing as editor of Rupa and HarperCollins India and then took up broa dcasting with the BBC World Service in London. She presented ‘The World Today’, BBC World Service’s flagship news and current affairs programme. She was subsequently The Tim es of India’s Foreign Editor based in London, reporting on Europe. Till 2011, she was editor of Th e Sunday Times of India, based in Delhi. Her e-novel 'The Pomegranate Peace' tells the inside story of American intervention in Afghanistan.www.rashmee.com


S. Mitra Kalita is the ideas editor at Quartz, and be hind some of the global economy site's most viral content. She worked previously at The Wall Street Jo urnal, where she oversaw coverage of the Great Recession, launched a local news section fo r New York City and reported on the housing crisis. She also launched Mint, a business paper i n New Delhi, and has previously worked for the Washington Post, Newsday and the Associat ed Press. She is the author of three books related to migration and globalization, and speaks s even languages (but only four of them well). She has taught at St. John's, Columbia and UMass -Amherst, and previously served as president of the South Asian Journalists Association. She is an adjunct fellow at the Poynter Institute and lectures around the world everything from digi tal journalism to diversity to India's role in the new global economy. Born in Brooklyn, Mitra was raised in Long Island, Puer to Rico and New Jersey-with regular trips to her grandparents’ villages in Assam, India. She lives (and eats) in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of New York City, along with her artist husband and two daughters. She tweets @mitrakalita and her website is www.mitrakalita.com . She is spending this year doing a fellowship at Columbia and reporting a book on school ch oice through the lens of one New York City neighborhood. More of her work can be read at: http://qz.com/author/smkalita/ and http://mitrakalita.com/articles-page/


Ajit Balakrishnan is an Indian entrepreneur, business executive and administrator. He is from Kerala. He is a resident of Mumbai, India. He is the founder and current Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Rediff.com, an internet company based in Mumbai. Balakrishnan is also the current Chairman of the Board of Governors of Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIM Calcutta). He writes a column in Business Standard and has written a book published by Macmillan Publishers called The Wave Rider. He has co-authored a research paper, Generic Framework for a Recommendation System using Collective Intelligence, with Alkesh Patel which was presented at the International Conference on Internet Technology and Secured Transactions, 2009.


Lakshmi Gandhi is currently the Jobs and Education Editor at Metro New York. As a freelance journalist, her work has appeared on NBC News' Asian America vertical, The Toast, NPR's Code Switch blog and more. She's always been passionate about South Asian issues and in 2013 she she co-founded the popular blog The Aerogram along with two colleagues.


Padma Lakshmi established herself as a food expert early on in her career, having hosted two successful cooking shows and writing a best-selling cookbook Easy Exotic, for which she won the International Versailles Event for best cookbook by a first time writer. Lakshmi followed this success with the publication of her second cookbook, Tangy, Tart, Hot & Sweet, released by Weinstein Books which has over 150 recipes from around the world alongside intriguing personal memoirs. Lakshmi hosted “Padma’s Passport” on The Food Network where she cooked diverse cuisine from around the world. Lakshmi has also hosted “Planet Food,” a documentary series broadcast on The Food Network and worldwide on the Discovery Channel. She journeyed to countries such as Spain and India. Lakshmi is Emmy nominated for her role as host and judge on Bravo’s “Top Chef” which has recently been awarded an Emmy for Outstanding Reality Competition Show. On the screen, Lakshmi was last seen as a guest star on Royal Pains. She was also last seen in Aishwarya Rai and Dylan McDermott in Paul Mayeda Berges' newest film “Mistress of Spices.” She then played Princess Bithia in ABC's much anticipated mini-series “The Ten Commandments” alongside Naveen Andrews (“Lost”), Omar Sharif and Dougray Scott. Lakshmi also recently starred in BBC America’s “Sharpe’s Challenge” opposite Sean Bean. She has appeared in films in the US, Italy, and India. Other television credits include hosting Rai Television's “Domenica In,” Italy’s highest rated program. Lakshmi is also an accomplished writer. In addition to her food writing, she has contributed to such magazines as American Vogue, Gourmet and British and American Harper's Bazaar.


Floyd Cardoz is a celebrated Indian American chef. Chef Cardoz was most recently Executive Chef of North End Grill, a seasonal American restaurant and bar owned by Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group, which he left in April 2014 to pursue personal culinary projects that focus back to his roots of cooking with Indian flavors, explore a project in India, and work on his forthcoming cookbook (Artisan, 2015). Chef Cardoz was the Executive Chef/Partner of Tabla, a beloved restaurant celebrating his groundbreaking New Indian cuisine that expertly married the sensual flavors and spices of his native land with Western technique. Under his leadership, Tabla received numerous accolades from the press (including Three-Stars from The New York Times) and was considered among New York’s most popular restaurants. After 12 incredible years hosting countless life celebrations, Tabla closed its doors in December 2010. One Spice, Two Spice (William Morrow Cookbooks), includes his favorite recipes, demystifies Indian food and flavors and teaching budding cooks how to expertly add Indian spices to American cuisine.


Chef Jehangir Mehta is the owner of two restaurants in New York City, a cookbook author, a former contestant on The Next Iron Chef, and a father of two. Chef Jehanigir Mehta’s passion for the culinary arts began in his own family’s kitchen in Mumbai. He began formal training at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, and from there went on to his first job at L’Absinthe in New York. Since then, Chef Mehta has worked at and helped to open a series of renowned restaurants and solidified his reputation for creating unorthodox, intellectually driven desserts. Chef Mehta opened Graffiti in the East Village of New York City in 2007 after being highly acclaimed at New York City restaurants including Aix, Compass, and Jean-Georges. Over the years, he has been seen on many national television programs such as Martha!, as well as being a contestant on Iron Chef America and The Next Iron Chef. He opened a second restaurant, Mehtaphor, in 2010.


Krishnendu Ray is an Associate Professor in food studies and Chair of the Department of Nutrition,Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University. Prior to joining NYU in 2005, he was a faculty member and an Associate Dean for Curriculum Development at The Culinary Institute of America. A food studies scholar with interests in the social and historical contexts of food production and consumption, he is the author of The Migrant’s Table (Temple University, 2004) and the co-editor of Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia (University of California Press, 2012). His forthcoming book (from Bloomsbury, 2016) is titled The Ethnic Restaurateur and the American City.


Suvir Saran - Renowned for his accessible approach to Indian flavors and techniques, Saran has penned three cookbooks: Indian Home Cooking: A Fresh Introduction to Indian Food, with More Than 150 Recipes (Clarkson Potter, 2004) with Stephanie Lyness; American Masala: 125 New Classics from My Home Kitchen (Clarkson Potter, 2007) with Raquel Pelzel; and Masala Farm: Stories and Recipes from an Uncommon Life in the Country (Chronicle Books, 2011) with Charlie Burd and Raquel Pelzel. Masala Farm was a James Beard Award finalist for Best American Cookbook for 2011. His recipes have been featured in publications such as Bon Appétit, Cooking Light, Food & Wine, Fine Cooking, Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, Departures, InStyle, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, as well as many others. He is a contributor to Food Arts magazine. He has been a featured judge on Next Iron Chef and Iron Chef on the Food Network and has had numerous appearances on national and local broadcasts. In spring 2011, Suvir was a break out star on Bravo’s Top Chef Masters, cooking to raise money for the Agricultural Stewardship Association. Most recently, Saran was Executive Chef/Owner at Devi in New York City, where he shared the authentic flavors of Indian home cooking with guests. Under Saran’s leadership, Devi consistently received popular and critical acclaim and earned a three-star rating from New York magazine and two stars from the New York Times. It was the first Indian restaurant in the U.S. to earn a Michelin star.


Acclaimed for expertly combining traditional Indian ingredients with a blend of Indian, European and American pastry techniques, Surbhi Sahni has created sublime desserts, like Ginger Panna Cotta and Mango Cheesecake, over the past 15 years for such New York high-end Indian restaurants as Tulsi, Dévi, Amma and Tamarind; as well as trained in the pastry kitchens at Picholine, davidburke & donatella and Between the Bread. Her desserts have been featured in O, The Oprah Magazine, Esquire, New York Daily News, Time Out New York and Food Arts. She holds a bachelor’s degree in hotel management from India’s Manipal School of Hotel Administration and a master’s degree in food studies and food management from New York University. She is currently the Executive Pastry chef at Tulsi Restaurant and has her own Wedding cake and Dessert company Bittersweet NYC.


Ayad Akhtar was born in New York City and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is the author of American Dervish, published in over twenty languages worldwide and a 2012 Best Book of the Year at Kirkus Reviews, Toronto's Globe and Mail, Shelf-Awareness, and O (Oprah) Magazine. He is also a playwright and screenwriter. His stage play Disgraced played at New York's LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater in 2012, and won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His latest play, The Who & The What, premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in February 2014, and will be opening in New York at LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater in June 2014. As a screenwriter, he was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay for The War Within. He has been the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo, as well as commissions from Lincoln Center Theater and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He is a graduate of Brown and Columbia Universities with degrees in Theater and Film Directing.


Patrick Healy has been the theater reporter for the New York Times since 2008, covering Broadway, Off Broadway, and national theater news and feature stories. Other assignments at the Times include covering the 2008 presidential campaign (for sixteen months, he was the paper's lead reporter on Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign) and serving as the political correspondent in the Times Metro section. Patrick was a reporter for The Boston Globe from 2000 until late 2004. While at The Globe, he covered the presidential campaigns of Senator John Kerry and Senator John Edwards; several foreign assignments that brought him to Iraq and Afghanistan; and higher education in Boston, Cambridge, and the region. In 2002, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting on higher education. In 2001, he received the Livingston Award for his Globe series on Harvard honors and grade inflation. From 1994 until 2000, Patrick worked for The Chronicle of Higher Education, first as a reporter for government and politics and later as political editor. He began his career as a reporter at Foster's Daily Democrat in New Hampshire. Patrick studied English at Tufts University, graduating in 1993.

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