iaac literary festival 2021 press materials

Jennifer Acker

Jennifer Acker is founder and editor in chief of The Common, and author of the debut novel The Limits of the World. Her short stories, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared in Amazon Original Stories,... Washington Post, Literary Hub, n+1, The Yale Review, and Ploughshares, among other places. Acker has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches writing and editing at Amherst College, where she directs the Literary Publishing Internship and organizes LitFest. She lives in western Massachusetts with her husband.jenniferacker.com

Dr. Ravi Shankar

Pushcart prize winning poet, translator and professor Ravi Shankar has published, edited or has forthcoming over fifteen books, including the Muse India award-winning translations of 9th century Tamil poet/saint, Andal, 'The Autobiography of a Goddess' (Zubaan/University of Chicago), 'The Golden Shovel: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks" (University of Arkansas) and 'The Many Uses of Mint: New and Selected Poems 1997-2017' (Recent Works Press).... Along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he co-edited W.W. Norton's "Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond" and he founded one of the world's oldest electronic journals of the arts, Drunken Boat. He has taught and performed around the world and currently holds a research fellowship from the University of Sydney. His collaborative chapbook, 'A Field Guide to Southern China' written with T.S. Eliot Prize winner George Szirtes was just published in the UK August 2019 by Eyewear Publishing.

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Narayan Hegde

Narayan Hegde is Emeritus Professor of English at SUNY College at Old Westbury, where he taught English, Indian, and World Literatures. As a Senior Fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies, he has translated several works of Kannada literature, ... including Stallion of the Sun and Other Stories by U. R. Ananthamurthy, Annayya's Anthropology by A. K. Ramanujan, and a 19th-century drama, The Marriage Farce of Iggappa Hegade. He is a recipient of the Katha Translation Award. Translation of Avasthe, a Kannada novel by the eminent Indian author, U.R.Ananthamurthy, was recently published by HarperCollins India. He is currently part of a team translating the 15th century Kannada epic Kumaravyasa Bharatha for publication by Harvard University Press in its Murty Classical Library of India series.

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Professor S.N. Sridhar

Professor S.N. Sridhar is SUNY Distinguished Service Professor, Professor of Linguistics and India Studies, and Director of the Mattoo Center for India Studies at Stony Brook University, where he has been teaching since 1980.He graduated from Central College, Bangalore University, with a B.A. (Honors) and M.A. in English literature and linguistics with a first class and the first rank for the University. ... He did a Ph.D. in Linguistics with distinction from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Professor Sridhar is an internationally recognized expert on multilingualism, Indian linguistics, World Englishes, and Kannada. His research concerns many areas, including: bilingualism (language contact and convergence); sociolinguistics of code-switching and code-mixing, language modernization, language spread; second language acquisition in non-native settings; Indian English and other World Englishes; reference grammar of Kannada (syntax, morphology, social dimensions); psycholinguistics (sentence production, code-mixing), applied linguistics (scope and relation to linguistic theory), historical linguistics (acquisition of subjecthood, contact-induced language change), and history of linguistics (Indian grammatical tradition). Currently, he is working on a monograph on multilingualism in India and another on the classic Kannada poet Kumara Vyasa and another on multilingualism in India. He heads an international consortium of scholars translating the Kannada classic Mahabharata by Kumaravyasa into English, to be published in three volumes in the Murthy Classical Library by Harvard University.

Professor Sridhar is author of three books: Kannada: Descriptive Grammar (Routledge, 1990 and Manohar 2001), Cognition and Sentence Production: A Cross-Linguistic Study (Springer Verlag, 1986), and India Kannada (Contemporary Kannada, Kannada University, 1995 and Abhinava, 2009); co-editor of two reference volumes ( Ananya: A Portrait of India (AIA, 1997), and Language in South Asia (Cambridge, 2008) and seven special issues of journals, and author of numerous peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries.

Professor Sridhar’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. He was designated Senior/Superior Scholar in the Humanities by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has been a plenary or keynote speaker at many international conferences, including the Linguistic Society of India in 2013, and member of editorial board of journals, evaluator of publication projects and academic programs. He was conferred the select faculty rank of Distinguished Service Professor by the State University of New York in 2011. He is Vice-President and President Elect of the International Association of World Englishes.

Professor Sridhar is a co-founder of South Asian Languages Analysis (SALA) and organized its international conferences at Stony Brook in 1983 and 2004. He has also organized or co-organized conferences on Dravidian Linguistics, India Studies, the Teaching of Linguistics, and Teaching of Asian Languages.

Professor Sridhar is the founding Director of the Center for India Studies at Stony Brook, which has evolved over two decades into a national model of Indian American community-public university partnership in developing India Studies. He also served as the Founding Chair of the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies from 2002-2008.Professor Sridhar is also active in the community. He founded the India Society of Stony Brook in 1989 and served as its first President until 1994. He has also served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Association of Indians in America and of the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Board of Governors of the Indo-American Arts Council, New York.He lives in Stony Brook with his wife and collaborator, Professor Kamal (Meena) Sridhar.

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Kushal Choksi

Book Talk: On a Wing and a Prayer

Kushal Choksi is an entrepreneur, a first-time author and a former Wall Street trader. ... After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University, he started his career at Goldman Sachs in New York City. Narrowly escaping death during the 9/11 attacks, he realized that life was too short to be playing safe. This got him started down the path of an eventful entrepreneurial journey, comprising of one failed venture and two successful acquisitions of an investment fund as well as a tech start-up. He currently runs Elements Truffles, an artisanal chocolate company that he co-founded with his wife.

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Dr. Nirmal K. Mattoo

Dr. Mattoo is the Chairman of the Indo American Arts Council. He is also the co-founder and owner of Atlantic Dialysis ... Management services, the largest private dialysis provider in New York State. Previously, he was the CEO of Wyckoff-Heights Medical Center and co-chairman of the Chief Medical Officer’s Council of the Columbia Presbyterian system. He is the President of the Mattoo Center of India Studies at State University of New York. He is also the Co Editor of the book Ananya. A Portrait of India.

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Rajeev Kaul

Rajeev Kaul is a principal with the New York- based Kaul Group. The Kaul Group provides financing, corporate advisory, and tax and ... audit services to a diversified client base. Kaul Group is also involved with BPO operations in India. The Kaul Group helps enterprises at various stages of capitalization – from startups to mergers & acquisitions. Clients of the Kaul Group range from one-man start-up operations to Fortune 100 companies.
Rajeev is also a principal in Berkshire Ventures Corp – a hospitality related investment group whose portfolio properties are spread across from Washington DC to Florida. Rajeev is one of the founders of UnderHill Technologies Inc, which is in the process of setting up an IT Park in India.
Rajeev Kaul is a CPA and has a MBA in Finance. He has spoken about finance, investment and taxes at various places like Columbia Business School, Harvard Business Club, CUNY and Asian American research institute. The Kaul Group received top ten Asian American business award from USPAAACC in 2013.
Rajeev is a Board member of US India Friendship Alliance Inc and Women’s Empowerment Project. Rajeev is also a founding member of MP NRI Development Committee Inc, a NGO dedicated to the improvement of education of young girls in the state of MP, India. He currently is an Executive Board member of Indo- American Arts council Inc.

Amrtya Sen

Book Talk: Home in the World A Memoir

Amartya Sen is Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, at Harvard University and ... was until 2004 the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Earlier on he was Professor of Economics at Jadavpur University Calcutta, the Delhi School of Economics, and the London School of Economics, and Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford University.
Amartya Sen has served as President of the Econometric Society, the American Economic Association, the Indian Economic Association, and the International Economic Association. He was formerly Honorary President of OXFAM and is now its Honorary Advisor. His research has ranged over social choice theory, economic theory, ethics and political philosophy, welfare economics, theory of measurement, decision theory, development economics, public health, and gender studies. Amartya Sen’s books have been translated into more than forty languages, and include Choice of Techniques (1960), Growth Economics (1970), Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970), On Economic Inequality (1973, 1997); Poverty and Famines (1981); Utilitarianism and Beyond (jointly with Bernard Williams, 1982); Choice, Welfare and Measurement (1982), Commodities and Capabilities (1985), The Standard of Living (1987), On Ethics and Economics (1987); Hunger and Public Action (jointly with Jean Drèze, 1989); Inequality Re-examined (1992); The Quality of Life (jointly with Martha Nussbaum, 1993); Development as Freedom (1999); Rationality and Freedom (2002); The Argumentative Indian (2005); Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2006), The Idea of Justice (2009), An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (jointly with Jean Drèze, 2013), and The Country of First Boys (2015).
Amartya Sen’s awards include Bharat Ratna (India); Commandeur de la Legion d'Honneur (France); the National Humanities Medal (USA); Ordem do Merito Cientifico (Brazil); Honorary Companion of Honour (UK); the Aztec Eagle (Mexico); the Edinburgh Medal (UK); the George Marshall Award (USA); the Eisenhower Medal (USA); and the Nobel Prize in Economics.

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John Makison

John Makinson is currently Chair of the Advisory Board of the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, and   ... a member of the board of Harvard University Press.  From 2013 until the end of 2016 John was Chairman of Penguin Random House, the world’s largest consumer book publisher. He was Chairman and Chief Executive of Penguin Group between 2002 and 2013.
  John began his career as a journalist first at Reuters and then at the Financial Times, where he edited the influential Lex Column. Following a spell in the United States with Saatchi & Saatchi, he returned to the UK to establish Makinson Cowell, an independent consultancy. John returned to the FT in 1994 as the newpaper’s Managing Director and two years later was appointed Financial Director of Pearson, the FT’s parent. John has chaired a number of organisations in the not-for-profit sector, including IPPR, the UK’s leading progressive think tank, IRC UK, a humanitarian organisation, Comic Relief, USA, and the National Theatre. He divides his time between New York and London.

Indra Nooyi

Book Talk: My Life in Full

Indra Nooyi was CEO and Chairman of PepsiCo from 2006 to 2019. She is a highly sought-after advisor ... to business and governments. At PepsiCo, she was the chief architect of Performance with Purpose, the company’s mission to deliver sustained growth by making more nutritious products, limiting its environmental footprint, and empowering its associates and people in the communities it serves. She has been awarded the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian honour, the U.S. State Department’s award for Outstanding American by Choice, and 15 honorary degrees. Her memoir, My Life in Full: Work, Family and Our Future, is also a call-to-action on how society can blend work and family.

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Nitin Nohria

Nitin Nohria served as the tenth dean of Harvard Business School from 2010-2020. ... He previously served as co-chair of the Leadership Initiative, Senior Associate Dean of Faculty Development, and Head of the Organizational Behavior Unit. His intellectual interests center on human motivation, leadership, corporate transformation and accountability, and sustainable economic and human performance. He is co-author or co-editor of 16 books. Nohria is also the author of over 50 journal articles, book chapters, cases, working papers, and notes. He sits on the Board of Directors of Bridgespan and Rakuten Medical, as well as on the Board of Trustees of Massachusetts General Hospital. In addition, he serves as a senior advisor to BDT Capital Partners, Piramal Enterprises, and Tata Sons (where he served on the Board of Directors for 6 years). He is also on the Advisory Board of Akshaya Patra and ShopX, and is a strategic advisor to the Board of Anheuser-Busch InBev and Focusing Capital on the Long Term Global (FCLTGlobal). He has been interviewed by ABC, CNN, and NPR, and cited in Business Week, The Economist, Financial Times, Fortune, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Prior to joining the Harvard Business School faculty, Nohria received his Ph.D. in Management from the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a B. Tech. in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (which honored him as a Distinguished Alumnus in 2007).

Jairam Ramesh

Book Talk: The Light of Asia

Jairam Ramesh is presently a Member of Parliament and Chairman of Parliament's Standing Committee on Science and Technology, ... Environment, Forests and Climate Change. He has been Union Minister between 2006 and 2014 and held several key portfolios. He has played a widely acknowledged key role in global climate change negotiations. He is also a noted author whose works have also been translated into several Indian languages. One of his books was translated into Chinese as well. His 2019 book A Chequered Brilliance: The Many Lives of V.K. Krishna Menon won the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Award for Non-Fiction from the New India Foundation. His biographies of Indira Gandhi and P.N.Haksar have drawn wide acclaim and his most book is The Light of Asia: The Poem that defined the Buddha.

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Vishakha Desai

Dr. Vishakha Desai is Senior Advisor for Global Affairs to the President of Columbia University, ... Chair of the Committee on Global Thought and Senior Research Scholar in Global Studies at the School of International and Public Affairs.
Dr. Desai served as President and CEO of the Asia Society, a global organization dedicated to strengthening partnerships among peoples of Asia and the U.S. from 2004 through 2012. As President, she set the direction for the Society’s diverse sets of programs ranging from policy initiatives and national educational programs to ground breaking exhibitions and performing arts programs throughout its network of eleven offices in the U.S. and Asia. Under her leadership the society expanded the scope and scale of its activities with the opening of new offices in India and Korea, a new center of U.S.–China Relations, and inauguration of two new architecturally distinguished facilities in Hong Kong and Houston. She also developed several signature initiatives with a focus on young people: internationally themed public high schools in the U.S. and a major young leaders program, Asia 21, that brings together leaders under the age of 30 from across Asia and the U.S. Prior to becoming President, Dr. Desai held various senior positions at the Asia Society from 1990 to 2004.

Dr.Ravi Shankar

Book Talk: Correctional A Memoir

DR. RAVI SHANKAR is a Pushcart prize-winning poet, translator and professor who has published 15 books, ... including the Muse India award-winning translations Andal: The Autobiography of a Goddess and The Many Uses of Mint: New and Selected Poems 1997-2017. Along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he co-edited W.W. Norton's Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond called "a beautiful achievement for world literature" by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. He has taught and performed around the world and appeared in print, radio and TV in such venues as The New York Times, NPR, BBC and the PBS Newshour. He has won awards to the Corporation of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, fellowships from the Rhode Island and Connecticut Counsel on the Arts, founded one of the oldest electronic journals of the arts Drunken Boat, is Chairman of the Asia Pacific Writers & Translators (APWT) and recently finished his PhD from the University of Sydney. His memoir “Correctional” is forthcoming in 2021 with University of Wisconsin Press.

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Caleb Smith

Caleb Smith is professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. He writes about American ... literature and culture, with special attention to cultural histories of discipline, violence, and conflicts over justice. Smith’s books include The Prison and the American Imagination (Yale University Press, 2009); The Oracle and the Curse (Harvard University Press, 2013); and the first published edition Austin Reed’s 1858 prison memoir, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict (Random House, 2016).
Smith has written about contemporary media and the arts for Avidly, Bomb Magazine, The Immanent Frame, Paper Monument, Yale Review, and other venues. He is a contributing editor at Los Angeles Review of Books and a co-editor of No Crisis, a special series on the state of criticism in the twenty-first century.

Karthika Nair

Book Talk: Different Distance: A Renga

Karthika Nair is the coauthor of A Different Distance. She is a poet, fabulist and librettist whose ... books include The Honey Hunter, illustrated by Joelle Jolivet. Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, her reimagining of the foundational South Asian epic in multiple voices, won the 2015 Tate Literature Live Award for Book of the Year (Fiction), was shortlisted for the Atta Galatta Prize and highly commended in the 2016 Forward Prizes. Nair has scripted and coscripted performances for choreographers Akram Khan (DESH, Chotto Desh, and Until the Lions, adapted from her own book), Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui & Damien Jalet (Babel 7.16), and Carlos Pons Guerra (Mariposa). She is the co-founder of Cherkaoui's Antwerp-based dance company, Eastman, and executive producer of several of his and Damien Jalet's works.

Marilyn Hacker

MARILYN HACKER is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Blazons and A Stranger’s Mirror (longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award), ... a collaborative book, Diaspo/Renga, written with Deema K. Shehabi, and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices. Her eighteen translations of French and Francophone poets include Samira Negrouche’s The Olive Trees’ Jazz, Jean-Paul de Dadelsen’s That Light, All at Once,and Claire Malroux’s Daybreak. She is a former editor of the Kenyon Review, and of the French literary journal Siecle 21. She received the 2009 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen, the 2010 PEN Voelcker Award for her own work, and the international Argana Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh’ir/ House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She lives in Paris

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Arundhathi Subramaniam

Arundhathi Subramaniam is a leading Indian poet and author of thirteen books of poetry and prose. ... Her most recent work, Love Without a Story (Bloodaxe Books, 2020) has been described as 'a breathtaking and heartwarming book' (Poetry Book Society Bulletin) and as a book by 'a unique poet of our times... in a league all by herself' (Indian Literature).
Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2015, she is the recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award (India’s national academy of letters), the inaugural Khushwant Singh Prize, the Raza Award for Poetry, the Il Ceppo Award in Italy, the Mystic Kalinga Award, the Zee Women's Award for Literature, and the Homi Bhabha and Charles Wallace fellowships, among others. She has been widely anthologized and translated into several languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Italian, German, Spanish and French.
Other works include Women Who Wear Only Themselves, a recent book of conversations with female spiritual travelers; The Book of Buddha; the acclaimed Penguin anthology of sacred poetry, Eating God, and the bestselling Penguin biography of a contemporary mystic, Sadhguru: More Than a Life.
She has worked over the years as critic and performing arts curator with Bombay’s National Centre for the Performing Arts. She has also been the founder editor of the India domain of the Poetry International Web, an online journal grew into a significant archive of contemporary Indian poetry. She divides her time between Bombay, Madras and New York.

Dan Nainan

Book Talk: Accidentally Funny

I was a senior engineer with Intel Corporation. My job was to travel the world with the company's senior executives, ... doing technical demonstrations on stage at events, and I was incredibly nervous about speaking on stage. I took a comedy class to get over the fear, and the comedy kind of took off. Since leaving Intel to pursue comedy full-time, I have performed at two Democratic National Conventions, at a TED Conference, at several presidential inaugural galas, for President Obama, Donald Trump, Rudolph Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, Hillary Clinton, Steve Wozniak, Arianna Huffington and for many similar luminaries. Also, I appeared in an Apple 'Get a Mac' commercial and recently did voiceover work for the animated series 'Family Guy'. I have performed in almost every state as well as in 27 foreign countries. My life is like that of George Clooney in 'Up in the Air', just without the sex LOL.

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Dharti Arvind Desai

As the founder and CEO of FineWinesnMore (FWM), a Mumbai-based wholesaler and direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing company ... with over 25,000 customers, Desai played an integral role in the development and implementation of the interactive platform. Earning her recognition as both a pioneer of DTC channel sales and marketing and as an industry leader in innovation and education for wine consumers, Desai is also the founder and CEO of MOS India Pvt. Ltd., a state-of-the-art print production company with clients in over 10 countries.
In addition, Desai provides go-to-market and scale-up consultation to growth stage companies in the USA and India. She is an annual jury member of the International Echo Awards of The Association of National Advertisers. She is also an early-stage investor with Bodhi Capital and Plum Alley Investments.
Through her versatile leadership and advisory roles with The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE), a global not-for-profit organization “for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs”, she champions young and women entrepreneurs globally. As a single mom and a passionate advocate for education, she co-founded her family’s nonprofit Animedh Charitable Trust (ACT) in 2012. ACT provides basic and higher education for women and girls from impoverished and under-represented communities and empowers them to be economically independent.

Guruprasad Kaginele

Book Talk: Hijab

A doctor by profession, Guruprasad Kaginele has been a prominent voice in contemporary Kannada literature. ... He has published three short story collections, three novels, and two essay collections. He has also been the editor for two books published by the US based ‘Kannada Saahithya Ranga’. His short stories have been translated into Telugu, Konkani, Malayalam and English. Hijab (first published in 2017) received both popular and critical acclaim, including the 2017 Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award. Kaginele lives in Rochester, Minnesota with his family.

Pavan Rao

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Professor Sridhar

Professor S.N. Sridhar is SUNY Distinguished Service Professor, Professor of Linguistics and India Studies, ... and Director of the Mattoo Center for India Studies at Stony Brook University, where he has been teaching since 1980.He graduated from Central College, Bangalore University, with a B.A. (Honors) and M.A. in English literature and linguistics with a first class and the first rank for the University. He did a Ph.D. in Linguistics with distinction from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Professor Sridhar is an internationally recognized expert on multilingualism, Indian linguistics, World Englishes, and Kannada. His research concerns many areas, including: bilingualism (language contact and convergence); sociolinguistics of code-switching and code-mixing, language modernization, language spread; second language acquisition in non-native settings; Indian English and other World Englishes; reference grammar of Kannada (syntax, morphology, social dimensions); psycholinguistics (sentence production, code-mixing), applied linguistics (scope and relation to linguistic theory), historical linguistics (acquisition of subjecthood, contact-induced language change), and history of linguistics (Indian grammatical tradition). Currently, he is working on a monograph on multilingualism in India and another on the classic Kannada poet Kumara Vyasa and another on multilingualism in India. He heads an international consortium of scholars translating the Kannada classic Mahabharata by Kumaravyasa into English, to be published in three volumes in the Murthy Classical Library by Harvard University.

Farzana Doctor

Book Talk: Seven

Farzana Doctor is the Tkaronto-based author of four novels: Stealing Nasreen, Six Metres of Pavement, All Inclusive, and Seven. ... Seven was chosen for many 2020 Best Book lists and shortlisted for the Trillium and Evergreen Awards. Her poetry collection, You Still Look The Same, will be released in May 2022.  Farzana is also the Maasi behind Dear Maasi, a new sex and relationships column for FGM/C survivors. She is also an activist and part-time psychotherapist.

Website: http://www.farzanadoctor.com

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Veena Rao

Veena Rao is an award-winning journalist and author. Purple Lotus, her recently released debut novel, is a 2021 Georgia Author of the Year finalist, ... a 2021 American Fiction Award winner, and an award-winning finalist in the multicultural and women’s fiction categories of the 2021 International Book Awards. She is the founder, publisher, and editor-in-chief of NRI Pulse, an Atlanta-based news publication. She has been recognized by The Limca Book of Records (the Indian version of the Guinness Book of Records) as the first Indian woman to edit and publish a newspaper outside India. When she is not writing or meeting press deadlines, you will find her meditating or photographing the flora and fauna on her wooded walk route.

Anantmurthy

Book Talk: Avasthe: A Novel

UR Ananthamurthy (1932–2014) is one of India's greatest literary figures and public intellectuals. ... His publications include novels, short stories, poetry, translations and essays in literary and cultural criticism. He has been awarded the Padma Bhushan and the Jnanpith Award. Narayan Hegde is a translator and Emeritus Professor of English at SUNY College, Old Westbury. He is a recipient of the Katha Translation Award and an NEA Literature Fellowship.

Narayan Hegde

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Priyanka Champaneri

Book Talk: City of Good Death

Priyanka Champaneri received her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University and has been a fellow at ... the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts numerous times. Her debut novel, The City of Good Death, received the 2018 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and was shortlisted for the 2021 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

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Ranjani Murali

Ranjani Murali is the author of two books of poetry, Blind Screens (Almost Island, 2017) ... and Clearly You Are ESL (The "Great" Indian Poetry Collective, 2020). The first book won the Prabha Khaitan Woman's Voice Award in 2019. Murali is the recipient of the 2014 Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Fine Arts Works Center.

Sanjena Sathian

Book Talk: Gold Diggers

A Paul and Daisy Soros fellow, Sanjena Sathian is a 2019 graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has worked as a reporter ... in Mumbai and San Francisco, with nonfiction bylines for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Food & Wine, The Washington Post, Vox, TIME, and more. Her award-winning short fiction has been published in The Atlantic, Conjunctions, Boulevard, Joyland, Salt Hill, and The Masters Review. Gold Diggers is her first novel.

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Jafreen Uddin

JAFREEN UDDIN was appointed EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR of the AAWW in January 2020. She is the first woman to lead the organization since its founding in 1991. ... With over a decade of experience working in the public sector, she specializes in communications, education, and fundraising.
She most recently served as Deputy Director of Development for Special Events with PEN America, managing a high-level portfolio of events and cultivation activities. Prior to joining PEN America, she helped oversee Executive Education as an Assistant Director with NYU’s Stern School of Business, developing and coordinating both degree and non-degree programming for cohorts of senior-level executives. She began her career with a nearly-eight-year stint at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, where she helped create the infrastructure for the public programming calendar of events, and spent nearly three years managing an online Book Salon for Aslan Media, spotlighting writers and artists from the greater Middle East/South Asia region.
She regularly volunteers her time with a number of literary and social change organizations. She previously served as Co-Chair of the Board of Directors for Laal NYC, an organization supporting Bangladeshi women in the Bronx, and currently serves as Chair of the Adult Internship Committee for We Need Diverse Books and as a Literary Council Member for the Brooklyn Book Festival. She received her B.A. in political economics from Barnard College, Columbia University, and her M.A. in global history from NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Science.

Rohan Chhetri

Book Talk: Shreela Ray: On the Life and Work of an American Master ; Lost, Hurt or in Transit Beautiful

Rohan Chhetri is a writer and translator. He is the author of SLOW STARTLE (Winner of the Emerging Poets Prize 2015), ... JURASSIC DESIRE (Winner of the Per Diem Prize 2017) and the forthcoming LOST, HURT, OR IN TRANSIT BEAUTIFUL (Tupelo Press/ HarperCollinsIN, 2021). A UK edition of the book is coming out from Platypus Press, 2022. He has co-edited SHREELA RAY: ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF AN AMERICAN MASTER (Unsung Masters Series, 2021) along with Kazim Ali. A recipient of a 2021 PEN/Heim Grant for translation, his poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Revue Europe, AGNI and New England Review, and have been translated into Greek and French.

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Sudha Murthy

Book Talk: xyz

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Yatindra Mishra

Book Talk: Akhtari

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Maestro Amjad Ali Khan

Amjad Ali Khan is one of the undisputed masters of the music world. Born to sarod maestro Haafiz Ali Khan, ... he gave his first performance at the age of six, and is credited with reinventing the technique of playing the sarod. Over the course of a distinguished career spanning more than six decades, Amjad Ali Khan has won numerous accolades including a Grammy nomination, the Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum, Unicef’s National Ambassadorship and the Fukuoka Cultural grand prize. He has performed at venues the world over including Carnegie Hall and the Royal Albert Hall, as well as at the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize Concert in 2014 in Oslo, Norway. Samaagam, his first Sarod Concerto, has been performed by the Britten Sinfonia, Orchestre National d’lle de France, Orchestre d’Auvergne, London Philharmonia, Gulbenkian Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Welsh National Opera and Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Amjad Ali Khan has also been a visiting professor at Stanford University, University of New Mexico and Jacob’s School of Music. Amjad Ali Khan recently received coveted Global Music Awards under the Gold Medal category for their outstanding contribution to the global music industry and excellence in the classical music sphere. The UN Day Concert 2018 featured Sarod virtuoso Amjad Ali Khan, accompanied by his sons Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash, and the Refugee Orchestra Project. The concert dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi was themed on “Traditions of Peace and Non-violence” in the presence of António Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations.

Kal Penn

Book Talk: You Can't Be Serious

Kal Penn is an actor, writer, producer, and former Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. He is known for ... his starring roles in Designated Survivor, House, Mira Nair’s The Namesake, the Harold & Kumar franchise, and the patriotic immigration sit-com Sunnyside which he co-created for NBC.
From 2009 to 2011, Kal took a sabbatical from acting to serve in the Obama/Biden administration, where he served as the President’s Liaison to Young Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and the Arts community. In these roles, he worked on a range of issues, including the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the Affordable Care Act, Pell Grants, arts and culture programs, the DREAM Act, and rapid response to the BP Oil Spill and earthquake in Haiti.
He was a national co-chair for the Obama/Biden re-election campaign in 2012 and served on the President’s Committee for the Arts and Humanities, focusing on arts education and cultural diplomacy. Penn has taught courses at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Los Angeles. Originally from New Jersey, he received his undergraduate degree in sociology, theater, film, and television at the University of California, Los Angeles, and received a graduate certificate in international security from Stanford University.
Penn recently wrapped production on the CBS Drama, Clarice (based on Silence of the Lambs), and Freeform’s late night youth election format show Kal Penn Approves This Message. He currently stars in the animated Disney Junior series Mira, Royal Detective, is an Executive Producer on the Viacom/Paramount + comedy, Surina & Mel, and can be heard in Nickelodeon’s It’s Pony.
His culinary competition series Money Hungry airs on Food Network this summer.
Kal’s first book You Can’t Be Serious releases on November 2nd, 2021 from Simon and Schuster/Gallery Books.

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