Neela Vaswani
Neela Vaswani is the author of the short story collection, Where the Long Grass Bends; the mixed-genre memoir, You Have Given Me a Country; the middle-grade novel, Same Sun Here (co-written with Silas House), and the picture book, This is My Eye (author and illustrator). She is the recipient of the American Book Award, a PEN/O.Henry Prize, the ForeWord Book of the Year Gold Medal, the Italo Calvino Prize for Emerging Writers, the Nautilus Book Award, and many other literary honors. Also an audio book narrator, she received a Grammy for her narration of I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World and an Audie Award for her narration of Same Sun Here.
She has been a Visiting-Writer-in-Residence at more than 100 institutions, among them: Knox College, 92nd Street Y (Tribeca), the Jimenez-Porter House at the University of Maryland, Kentucky Women Writers Conference, the Whitney Museum in New York City, and IIIT Hyderabad, India.
She has a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies, lives in New York City, and teaches at Spalding University's brief-residency MFA in Writing Program. An education activist in India and the United States, Vaswani is founder of the Storylines Project with the New York Public Library.
Vaswani’s unflinching eye shows the reader the beauty grounded in the mundane. -San Francisco Chronicle