SHILPA AGARWAL is the author of Haunting Bombay (Soho Press), a San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller and a winner of the First Words Literary Prize for South Asian Writers. It will be published internationally beginning next month in Italy. Shilpa earned her B.A. from Duke University and graduate degrees in Comparative Literature from UCLA. She has taught at both UCLA and UCSB and lives in Los Angeles with her family.

Shilpa is a member of the South Asian Artists’ Collective and a founder of ArtWallah: Festival of South Asian Arts. Her current writing is informed by glimpses into moments of alienation and awakening, especially during metaphoric and mystical crossings: east and west, heaven and earth, the living and 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 is currently writing her second book, researching madness, and developing a green thumb.