Washington DC South Asia Literary Festival Panel now on YOUTUBE

One of BUZZFEED News’ “15 Books From Smaller Presses You Won’t Be Able to Put Down!”

How to Write a Historical Novel and (MAYBE) not be in it….

Writing the Historical Novel: Reading and Craft talk with Dr. Nandini Bhattacharya–Zoom Nov. 5th 4-5 PM

Call for Papers on South Asia and Masculinity

We invite papers that are sensitive to contradictions, ambiguities, and affective dissonances that surface in the fictional depictions of masculinities due to economic, racial, religious, caste, and sexual hierarchies and conflicts.

April 15, 2021; Checks and Balances

Can a man die of oxygen deprivation if there’s a strong, heavy knee placed on his neck for 9 (oh, just give and take, the killings haven’t even slowed down yet, homeys) minutes? Or must we dig for alternative causes like all the ills that black folks have been heir to and victim-blamed for throughout these last great American centuries—drugs, poor self-care, poverty, despair, lack of faith in the SYSTEM and the MAN, systemic denigration [note the intended pun! The word means ‘to blacken’!] and devaluation—till we come up with something resembling business as usual.

Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may be in Utah

I wandered, literally, up and down the bruited and brutal ‘Oregon Trail’ which so many nineteenth-century Americans eager (or greedy) for a ‘better life,’ for the ‘American Dream’ set out on, in unbelievably rickety wagons, with children, wives, cattle, guns, food, elders (most in small quantities, except sometimes children) for the Pacific West and Northwest.