Panelist Bios and Short Film Screening Descriptions
Keynote Speaker
Chitra Banerjee
Divakaruni
is an award-winning author and poet. Her work is widely known, as she has
been published in over 50 magazines, including The Atlantic
Monthly and The New Yorker, and her writing has been
included in over 30 anthologies. Her works have been translated into 11
languages, including Dutch, Hebrew and Japanese.Her novel, The Mistress of Spices, is slated to be released as a feature film in 2006, directed by Paul Mayeda Berges, starring Aishwarya Rai and Dylan McDermott.
Divakaruni's newest novel, Queen of Dreams, was released in September 2004. The novel follows Rahki, an artist and divorced mother living in Berkeley, California. When her mother, an interpreter of dreams, passes away, Rahki must confront a forgotten past and an increasingly complex life in post 9-11 America.
Chitra Divakaruni has written several books of poetry, and her work has been included in over 30 anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Her first book of short stories, Arranged Marriage, has won critical acclaim and the 1996 American Book Award, the Bay Area Book Reviewers and PEN Oakland awards for fiction. Her other published novels are The Mistress of Spices, Sister of My Heart, and Vine of Desire, and she has written two books for children, Neela: Victory Song and The Conch Bearer
Other Panelists
Ranjan Adiga was born in Kathmandu, Nepal in 1976. In 2002, he won the European Epica Award for his advertising campaign, titled, "Terrorism Isn't Cute," and in the following year, he won the country-wide short story competition organized by the British Council in Kathmandu, Nepal. He has worked in advertising and social communications in Nepal, India, Singapore, and Bahrain, and is currently a graduate student of creative writing (fiction) at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Ranjan will be co-presenting a panel on what it means to write in English as a second language, at the AWP Conference in March.Nilofer Ahsan was born in Karachi, Pakistan to a Bengali father and a French mother. She has been writing poetry for 15 years and has performed her work in a number of venues in Chicago including: the Asian American Film Festival, Voices of Resistance, and a number of events coordinated by the Asian American Artists collective. In addition to her creative work she is a dedicated activist and has a professional career in children and family issues.
Shauna
Singh Baldwin's first novel What
the Body Remembers, the story of two women in a polygamous marriage
in Occupied India, received the Commonwealth Prize for Best Book
(Canada-Caribbean). English Lessons and Other Stories
received the Friends of American Writers prize. Her second novel,
The Tiger Claw (Knopf Canada 2004, Vintage Canada 2005), is
inspired by the life of Noor Inayat Khan (codename: Madeleine). The
story of a Sufi Muslim secret agent who searches for her beloved through
Occupied France, it was a finalist for the Giller Prize.
Neelanjana Banerjee is a San
Francisco-based writer whose poetry and fiction have been published in the
South Asian sex writing anthology Desilicious, Suspect Thoughts, The
Asian Pacific American Journal, A Room of One's Own and
Nimrod. The former editor-in-chief of AsianWeek
newspaper, she is currently the managing editor of YO! Youth
Outlook magazine, where she helps young people produce their own
media. In the third year of her MFA at San Francisco State University,
Banerjee is working on a collection of stories based on the life of her
uncle, a captain in the U.S. Army.
Anita Chandwaney is the author of "Gandhi Marg," a play set on Devon
Avenue, and "Success and the City" which was produced by The 24 Hour
Project. Anita is proud to be the Founding Executive Director of Rasaka Theatre Company, the
Midwest's first South Asian Ensemble. Rasaka recently closed it's
critically acclaimed and Jeff Recommended inaugural production of "The
Masrayana," in which Anita played Navi Masra. As an actress she has also
worked with Lookingglass, Organic, Pegasus, Live, and
Center Theatre in Chicago; Ensemble Studio Theatre, Playwright's Horizons
and Open Eye New Stagings in New York City. She has done several
one-liners in film and television and has worked on many commercials and
corporate videos. She's also worked as a corporate spokesperson for
Intel and Cisco Systems in the U.S. and Europe. Anita got her BFA in
Drama from Illinois Wesleyan University, and a classical acting diploma
from the London Theatre School in England.
Anna
Ghosh has been an agent at Scovil Chichak Galen Literary Agency since
1995 where she represents a wide variety of adult fiction and nonfiction
books. She is particularly interested in literary nonfiction, journalism,
history, science and books on social and cultural issues. Her recent and
upcoming titles include the New York Times Bestseller, THE LAST TRUE
STORY I"LL EVER TELL: AN ACCIDENTAL SOLDIER'S ACCOUNT OF THE WAR IN
IRAQ by John Crawford from Riverhead, ACROSS THE BLACK
WATERS: THE STORY OF THE INDIAN DIASPORA by Minal Hajratwala from
Houghton Mifflin, AMBITIOUS BREW: THE STORY OF BEER IN
AMERICA by Maureen Ogle from Harcourt and a book about
BOLLYWOOD by Anu Chopra from Warner.
Minal Hajratwala is writing a narrative
nonfiction book about the Indian diaspora as lived by her extended family,
to be published by Houghton-Mifflin next year. She was a journalist at
the San Jose Mercury News for eight years, and her poems and performance
have been published in various literary journals and anthologies. She was
a writing fellow at the Sundance Institute in 1999, an artist-in-residence
at the Jon Sims Center for the Performing Arts in 2000, and a fellow in
the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University in 2000-01.
Her performance-art piece, Avatars: Gods for a New
Millennium, premiered at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco in
1999. She lives in San Francisco and is a graduate of Stanford
University.
Summi Kaipa lives in Berkeley, California, where she studies to be a
therapist, perfects her cooking, and tries to find time to finish her
first book. While getting her MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Kaipa
founded the magazine, Interlope, which publishes innovative
writing by Asian Americans. In 2002, Summi received a Potrero Nuevo Fund
Grant to write and produce her first play, Triptych: Three Stories
of Desi Women. She has read from her work at many venues across
the United States, including the University of Hawaii, St. Mark's Poetry
Project, and Artwallah. Hoping one day to write cookbooks as well, Kaipa
experiments online at her blog.
Uma Krishnaswami is the author
of several books for children,including Chachaji's Cup
(Children's Book Press), Monsoon, and Naming
Maya (Farrar Straus Giroux). Her stories for children have
appeared in numerous children's magazines including Highlights for
Children, Ladybug, Cricket, and
Cicada. Her latest picture book is The Happiest
Tree: A Yoga Story, from Lee & Low Books. Uma is also co-director
of the Bisti Writing Project, a New Mexico site of the National Writing Project. She
leads writing workshops through the National Park Service and online
through Writers on the Net.
Anil Menon worked for about nine years in the
software industry worrying about things like secure distributed databases.
Then he shifted to a different kind of fiction. He is a 2004 Clarion West
graduate and his stories have been accepted for publication in
Albedo One, Chiaroscuro, InterNova, Fusing Horizons, Strange
Horizons and the anthology, TEL: Stories, edited by
Jay Lake. His edited volume, "Frontiers of Evolutionary Computation"
(Kluwer Academic Publishers) was released in February 2004.
Poet, performer and activist, Bushra Rehman
was born and raised in New York City, but has also lived in Pakistan
and Saudi Arabia. Bushra is co-editor of Colonize This! Young
Women of Color on Today's Feminism (Seal Press, 2002) and
author of the collection of poetry, Marianna's Beauty
Salon. In her work, Bushra tells stories of her immigrant
upbringing in Queens,the aunties, bodegas, stray dogs and street life
of children, with both humor and sincerity. She has been featured in
NY Newsday and her work has appeared in
ColorLines, Mizna, Curve, SAMAR, and
Bottomfish. Her writing is forthcoming in Writing
the Lines of Our Hands: An Anthology of South Asian American
Poetry (Creative Arts Press), Iqra: A Poetics of
Resistance, Muslim Women Redefine War (Seal Press) and
Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies
(Kent State University Press). Bushra performs her poetry regularly
around the country and has traveled with the Asian American Literary
Caravan, a group of artists whose goal is to bring Asian American
literature to all parts of America.
Prof. Clinton Seely's current research has
focused on the emergence of
modern (adhunik) Bangla literature in the 19th century, particularly the
works of Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824-73). Datta's writings raise
issues of what constitutes authentic "South Asian" at a time when the very
presence of the colonial powers tended to impinge upon all aspects of
Bengali life. Other topics of interest and research: Muslim writers and
their contributions to Bangla literature; modern poetry and prose,
specifically Jibanananda Das's writings; pre-modern literature, the mangal
kavya genre as well as the Islamic narratives and sakta
lyrical-cum-devotional poetry; and the Bangla language itself, in all its
myriad forms. Noticeably missing from this statement is mention of the
"-isms," which perforce inform to a greater or lesser degree all current
academic research.
Ravi Shankar is poet-in-residence at Central Connecticut State University
and founding editor of the international online journal of the arts,
Drunken Boat. His
first book of poems, Instrumentality, was published by
Cherry Grove in 2004. He
coordinated the 2005 CSU Writing Conference, has published work or has
work forthcoming in such places as The Paris Review, Poets &
Writers, Time Out New York, The Massachusetts Review, Blackbird,
Catamaran, Smartish Pace, and the AWP Writer's
Chronicle. Shankar has been a commentator on Wesleyan Radio and
NPR, received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Atlantic Center
for the Arts, has given readings at such venues as the National Arts Club,
the Asia Society, and Columbia University, and is currently editing an
anthology of South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern poetry. As a
youth, he was once forced to conjure silken scarves from an empty hat as
his father's, Sam the Super's, magician's apprentice.
Molshree Sharma, poet and artist, more info
soon.
Dr. Shailja Sharma, Assistant Professor of
English, DePaul University.
Dr. Sharma studies modern and contemporary British culture, postcolonial
theory, film studies, and cultural studies. She received her doctorate
from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Professor Woodman Taylor, more info soon.
Rashena Wilson, literary agent, more info
soon.
Laxmi, 2000, 10 mins., 35mm Color
Mann Ke Manjeere, India 2001, 5 mins., 35mm Color
Sangam (The Confluence), USA 2003, 27 mins., Video Color
Take the A Train, USA 2003, 16 mins., 16mm Color
The Bypass, UK/India 2004 | 15mins | 35mm Color
Amal, Canada/India 2004 | 18mins | Video Color
Arranged Marriage, UK 2003 | 15mins | 35mm Color
Waxed Poetic, USA 2004 | 2mins | Video Color
Good Thing, USA 2004 | 19mins | 35mm Color
The Waiter, UK 2004 | 4mins | Video Color
Call Center, USA 2004 | 12mins | Video Color
Holly-Bolly, UK 2004 | 12mins | Video Color
Maya the Indian Princess | 3 min
Happy Holi Maya! | 1.30 min
Sapna Gupta is a writer and activist. During
the day, she is a policy wonk and consults with non profits. At night
(and sometimes in the afternoon), she can be spotted sweating over her
laptop, writing fiction. Her writing has appeared in Crab
Orchard Review, SAMAR Magazine Online and in Artwallah's
Shabash 2.0. Her short story "Rajni Loves le Cancan"
received a 2005 Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council.
Monika
Jain, editor, Kahani: a
literary magazine for South Asian children. Ms. Jain has
previously worked with The Associated Press, PBS and also produced a
documentary series for Japan's NHK television. She grew up in Tokyo,
Japan.
Rukhsana
Khan is an award-winning author and storyteller. She was born in
Lahore, Pakistan and immigrated to Canada, with her family, at the age of
three. She grew up in the small town of Dundas, Ontario. Rukhsana began
by writing for community magazines and went on to write songs and stories
for the Adam's World children's videos. She currently has seven books
published and others under contract. Rukhsana is a member of SCBWI, The
Writers Union of Canada, CANSCAIP, Storytellers of Canada, and the
Storytelling School of Toronto. She tells tales of India, Persia, the
Middle East, as well as her own stories. She lives in Toronto with her
husband and family. She has four children: three girls and a boy.
Pooja Makhijani is the editor of
Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America, an
anthology of essays by women that explores the complex ways in which race
shapes American lives and families. Her first picture book, Mama's
Saris, is forthcoming from Little, Brown & Company Books for Young
Readers. Full-time, Pooja is an editor for Weekly Reader, a classroom
newsmagazine for grades 4, 5, and 6. She teaches writing and children's
literature at Western Connecticut State University's new low-residency MFA
program. While Pooja considers herself primarily a writer of children's
literature, she is also interested in exploring the spaces between fiction
and nonfiction, such as memoir and biography.
Sangeeta Mehta, Assistant Editor, Little,
Brown Books for Young Readers.
She is the editor of The Not-So-Star Spangled Life of Sunita
Sen by Mitali Perkins (Spring 2005); Um, Like... OM: A Girl
Goddess's Guide to Yoga by Evan Cooper (Spring 2005); and
Mama's Saris by Pooja Makhijani (Spring 2006).
Mary
Anne Mohanraj is the author of Bodies in Motion, a set of
Sri Lankan-American linked stories, covering two families and three
generations (July 2005, HarperCollins). She currently teaches fiction at
Vermont College and Roosevelt University, and is working on a follow-up
book, The Arrangement, a contemporary threesome novel. Other
works include Silence and the Word from Lethe Press;
Kathryn in the City from Penguin/Putnam; editor, Aqua
Erotica from Random House/Three Rivers Press. She currently serves
as the Executive Director of DesiLit (www.desilit.org), an organization
that works to support S. Asian and diaspora literature. Mohanraj was born
in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Meera Nair's debut collection,
Video,
received the Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction
in 2003 and was named one of the Best Books of the Year by The
Washington Post and Book magazine. She is a recipient
of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and The
New York Times. Her work has appeared on NPR's Selected
Shorts, as well as in The Threepenny Review,
Calyx, The New York Times, The National
Post, India Abroad and the anthology of Asian-American
writing, Charlie Chan is Dead 2. She teaches fiction at NYU
and is at work on her first novel, to be published by Pantheon.
Kenyan Indian poet Shailja Patel has appeared at
the Lincoln Center, New York and venues across the US and UK. Her work has
been broadcast on the National Radio Project, Pacifica Radio, KQED and the
BBC (UK). Published in numerous journals and anthologies, her awards
include an Outwrite Poetry Prize and a Voices Of Our Nations Scholarship.
Winner of national and Bay Area slam championships, Shailja was Featured
Literary Artist for APAture 2004, the nation's largest showcase of
emerging young Asian Pacific artists. Her current work-in-progress, a
one-woman spoken word show titled MIGRITUDE, has already attracted
considerable attention, and was the highlighted theatre presentation for
Artwallah 2005. Contact Shailja at shailjapatel@gmail.com.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a U.S.
raised, Toronto-based queer Sri Lankan writer, spoken word artist and arts
educator. The author of Consensual Genocide (Toronto South
Asian Review Press, forthcoming 2006), her writing has been published in
the anthologies Colonize This!, Dangerous Families, With a Rough
Tongue: Femmes Write Porn, the Lambda Award-nominated Brazen
Femme, Without a Net, Geeks, Misfits and Outlaws and A
Girl's Guide To Taking Over the World, as well as in the
periodicals Lodestar Quarterly, Mizna, Bamboo Girl, Bitch,
and Colorlines. She has performed her work throughout the
United States and Canada, including features at The Loft, Louder Arts,
Oberlin College and Yale University. She teaches writing to queer and
trans youth at Supporting Our Youth Toronto and is one of the co-founders
of the Asian Freedom School, a writing/performance/ radical Asian history
program for API youth in Toronto. She is currently completing work on
Dirty River, a memoir of growing up and coming out as a mixed
brown queer femme survivor in the Lower East Side and Toronto activist
scenes of the mid 90s, and on The Sri Lankan Women's Project,
a collaborative performance piece with Marian Yalini Thambynayagam and
Varuni Tiruchelvam on the untold stories of Sri Lankan women. She believes
in the power of creativity to empower, heal and decolonize, by any means
necessary.
Ligy J. Pullappally was born in Kerala,
India, and grew up in Chicago. After early excursions as a playwright,
she went to law school, and practiced law in Chicago for seven years.
During that time, she was Vice President of the Indian American Bar
Association of Chicago, an Executive Board Member of the social service
agency, Apna Ghar, and a recipient of the National Sunshine Peace Award
for her work in women's issues. Having written, directed and produced two
short films while practicing law, she left her law practice, and traveled
to India where she wrote, produced and directed her first feature film,
The Journey (Sancharram). The Journey has been honored with
a number of awards, including India's Best Debut Director, Lankesh Award
2005, and the Chicago Award for Best Film, 40th Chicago International Film
Festival. The Journey is currently screening at film
festivals worldwide.
Sanjay Shah is one of the writers of Badmash. Badmash is
a comic strip about brown folks that reaches over a million readers
through its website, weekly email, and print media. Sanjay Shah performs
stand up comedy, writes a comic strip, and trains at The Groundlings in
Los Angeles. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley.
Pireeni Sundaralingam was born in Sri
Lanka and currently lives in San Francisco. Her poetry addresses the
issues of civil war and exile, examining such universal themes as the loss
of land and language. A PEN USA Rosenthal Fellow, Pireeni was recently
named as "One of America's Emerging Writers" by the literary journal
Ploughshares. Her poetry has been featured in numerous
journals and anthologies in both USA and Europe, including The
Progressive and The May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge
Poetry and cited in such college texts as Three Genres
(Prentice Hall, 8th edition). Her work has been broadcast on radio in the
US, Ireland, UK and Sweden and will be featured in the International
Museum of Women next year. Her new album, "Bridge Across the Blue,"
interweaves music and poetry from a host of ethnic communities to tell the
immigration stories of America and was chosen as one of the ten best
recordings of poetry by the editors of About.Com.
Marian Yalini Thambynaygam, in collaboration
with Varuni Tiruchelvam, incorporates theater, spoken word, song, dance,
and music to dynamically explore issues within the Sri Lankan Tamil
community -- war, detention, the tsunami, etc. -- using gender and
sexuality as a lens. They take the audience on a powerful journey rife
with profound questioning, moments of loss, and a resurgence of hope and
love.
Varuni Tiruchelvam is a Sri Lankan Tamil
American Queer Woman cellist and educator for social change who hopes
share nourishment and nurturing with many people and the land. She plays
with Mango Tribe and Stone Forest Ensemble. Her favorite moments have
involved using cello sounds to support queer youth as they speak their
truth.
Sachin Waikar has published non-fiction in
Toddler and A Matter of Choice (Seal Press, 2003
& 2004) and Esquire (okay, so it was just a Letter to the
Editor). His screenwriting has placed in Miramax/HBO's Project
Greenlight and been nominated for an ABC/Disney Talent Grant.
Sachin received his bachelor's degree from Stanford University and a
doctorate in clinical psychology from UCLA.Short Film Screenings
Cross My Heart, 2004, 22 mins., 35mm Color
DIRECTOR(s): Avie Luthra
A young man leads a double life when he tries to convince his family that
he is "Indian" enough to inherit his uncle's video store. A hilarious
critique of racism within the Asian British community.
DIRECTOR(s): Mandrika Rupa
A coming-of-age story of an Indian girl growing up in colonial New
Zealand during wartime, 1942.
DIRECTOR(s): Sujit Sircar
A music video depicting the journey of a woman who becomes a liberated
truck driver.
DIRECTOR(s): Prashant Bhargava
Sangam is a place in India where three sacred rivers converge. The film
is a meditation on the rivers that bind and divide us.
DIRECTOR(s): Amyn Kaderali
When a prep school boy is the victim of a prank on the subway, he learns
that sometimes the end of the line is only just the beginning.
DIRECTOR(s): Amit Kumar
A tale about the circular nature of violence in the desert, where
danger lurks around every corner.
DIRECTOR(s): Richie Mehta
AMAL is a charming, engrossing story of a humble rickshaw driver in
chaotic New Delhi.
DIRECTOR(s): G D Jayalakshmi
Shashi is in love with a white boy in Scotland, so her parents send
her to India for a more suitable match arranged by her grandparents.
DIRECTOR(s): Keshni Kashyap
A little ode to the ancient Indian beauty practice of hair waxing.
DIRECTOR(s): Keshni Kashyap
An award-winning, insightful and bittersweet tale of a despondent husband
grappling with the question of whether you can ever find what you're
looking for.
DIRECTOR(s): Nilesh Patel
A clash of cultures between London's East End and Cambridge.
DIRECTOR(s): Amyn Kaderali
A comic spoof about the joys of "outsourcing" from the U.S. to India.
DIRECTOR(s): Dishad Husain
Two young filmmakers are forced to make the ultimate cross-genre film;
unfortunately for them, it's a cross between "British Gangster" and Indian
Bollywood.
DIRECTOR: Kavita Ramchandran
Maya wants to be a princess -- with a castle, a magic carpet, and a sari.
Using her imagination, she discovers all of these things in her own
room.
DIRECTOR: Kavita Ramchandran
Maya says goodbye to winter and welcomes spring with a splash of color.
