About

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, and 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 multiple Audies for other work.

Vaswani has a Ph.D. in American Cultural Studies and an MFA in Writing.  She lives in New York City with her family and teaches at Spalding University’s brief-residency MFA in Writing Program.  She is an education activist in the U.S. and India, a frequent collaborator with multimedia performance groups based in New York, and serves on the Board of Kweli Journal.