Neela Vaswani
Biography
Neela Vaswani
Neela Vaswani is author of the short story collection Where the Long Grass Bends, and a memoir, You Have Given Me a Country. Recipient of a 2006 O. Henry Prize and 1999 Italo Calvino Prize, her fiction and nonfiction have been widely anthologized and published in journals such as Epoch,Shenandoah and Prairie Schooner. She has been a visiting-writer-in-residence at Knox College, the Jimenez-Porter House at the University of Maryland, the Whitney Museum in New York City, IIIT Hyderabad, India, and other institutions. 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.
Her father is Sindhi-Indian and her mother is Irish-Catholic. By the time Vaswani was 18, her family had lived in 13 homes and traveled to 25 countries on doctor swaps and teaching tours. Vaswani has held a number of waitressing jobs, from chicken shacks to comedy clubs, and she paid off her school loans by cocktail waitressing at a fondue bar in NYC. Her first job was at a one-hour photo booth on Long Island. She has also dressed Armani models, delivered telephone books, worked cattle round-ups and barbed wire fencing, ripped tickets at a movie theatre, been a maid, a stage manager, a secretary, a prop girl for two independent movies, and driven an ice cream truck. She is left-handed although she plays the fiddle and knits right-handed. She loves paleontology, the Indian railway system, female detectives on television, goats, bats, bad-tempered camels, her husband, and online Boggle. Visit her website, ttp://www.neelavaswani.com/home-static.php.
Neela Vaswani
