About an Author 2009: Shilpa Agarwal

Shilpa Agarwal is a Los Angeles-based writer and academic. Born in Mumbai to a family uprooted by India ‘s Independence movement and subsequent Partition in 1947, Shilpa’s early writings explored how colonialism and the chaos of dislocation shaped human interaction. As an undergraduate at Duke University , Shilpa specialized in Asian and African literatures and Women’s Studies. She pursued her interest in post-colonial literatures as a doctoral student at the University of California , Los Angeles . She taught at both UCLA and UCSB, including a course on South Asian diaspora, and spoke regularly on the politics and poetics of community. Shilpa’s current writing is informed by glimpses into moments of alienation and awakening, especially during geographic and metaphoric crossings: east meets west, centers meet the peripheries, the living meet the dead. She writes to call up the haunting utterances of the excluded, to excavate fragmentary memories that edge consciousness, and to imagine a more nuanced narrative of history itself. Shilpa’s first novel, Haunting Bombay, is a winner of the 2003 First Words Literary Prize for South Asian writers

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