T127.
South Asian American Writers Charting New Narratives
Thursday, March 24, 2022
9:00 am to 10:15 am
The event brings together five south Asian American writers writing in diverse registers. Kirtan Nautiyal and Chaya Murali use their background in the medical profession to explore issues of class, racism, and the human body. Anuradha Kumar reads from her latest collection described as "subtle, brief, quiet even." Torsa Ghosal reads from her experimental fiction. Moazzam Sheikh reads from his fiction known for mixing interiority with external events of life.
Participants
Moazzam Sheikh is the author of The Idol Lover and Other Stories and Cafe Le Whore and Other Stories. He guest-edited Chicago Quarterly Review's special South Asian American issue (2017), which received notable mention in Best American Essays. His fiction and reviews have been published widely.
Anuradha Kumar has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and recently wrote A Sense of Time and Other Stories and The Hottest Summer in Years. She has written other novels for Hachette India, books for young readers, and she writes regularly for Scroll.in.
Torsa Ghosal is the author of an experimental novella, Open Couplets, and a book of literary criticism, Out of Mind. Her shorter writings have appeared in Necessary Fiction, Literary Hub, and Entropy. She is a professor of English at California State University and is at work on a second novel.
Kirtan Nautiyal is a practicing hematologist/oncologist near Houston, Texas. His nonfiction has been published or is upcoming in Crazyhorse, Guernica, the Southern Review, Boulevard, Longreads, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency. He is currently a senior nonfiction reader for Ploughshares.
Chaya Nautiyal Murali is a pediatric geneticist and Pushcart Prize-nominated personal essayist. Her work, which centers on family, identity, and inheritance, has appeared in SFWP Quarterly, Barely South Review, Aster(ix), and elsewhere.
