Robert Arnett

Robert Arnett is the author and photographer of the internationally acclaimed India Unveiled, winner of 3 national awards and the recently published children’s book, Finders Keepers?, winner of 4 national awards. He enjoys traveling around North America, sharing with adults and children the photographs and stories of the fascinating land.

Arnett has had an avid interest in India for over 30 years, but it was the mystique and spirit of the land that impelled him to spend almost two years there between 1988 and 2000.

Without itinerary or expectations, Arnett set out on his first of five trips across India. He traveled on trains and crowded country buses to photograph places with cultural and sacred significance. He participated in local rituals and celebrations and stayed in homes with Indian families of varied backgrounds. With a deep reverence for Indian culture, he has captured for posterity through his lens the very essence of the country.

A native of Columbus, Georgia, Arnett has a Master's Degree in History from Indiana University. Undergraduate studies were at Tulane University, University of Georgia, and the London School of Economics in England.

He has lectured widely throughout North America to include The Smithsonian Institute, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford Universities. He was a speaker at The Parliament of World Religions held in Cape Town, South Africa in December 1999. He has been interviewed on National Public Radio, Voice of America, South African Broadcasting Corporation, and various television appearances.

Samina Ali

Samina Ali (MFA, University of Oregon) born in Hyderabad, India, and raised in India and the U.S, is the author of Madras on Rainy Days (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a debut novel that chronicles a Muslim woman's journey from possession to self-possession. Ms. Ali was a panelist at the PEN/Faulkner Conference discussing the role of Islam in her novel. She is the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation award for fiction and has written for such publications as Self and Child Magazines, The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. Renowned author Bharati Mukherjee called Ms. Ali “a compelling storyteller. In language that is at once lyrical and unsentimental, she explores both the upside and the downside of being a first generation Muslim Indo-American woman, trapped between the demands of competing cultural heritages.” She lives in California with her son.

For more information on Samina Ali, visit her website at www.saminaali.com.

Anita Rau Badami

Anita Rau Badami began her career as a freelance writer in India with regular features in The Hindu, The Deccan Herald, and Indian Express. After immigrating to North America, Ms Badami graduated from the University of Calgary where she received an M.A. degree in English. Several of her short stories appeared in Canadian literary journals such as The Malahat Review, Event, and Toronto Review of Contemporary Fiction among others.

Tamarind Mem was Anita Rau Badami’s best-selling debut novel. She followed it with The Hero’s Walk which was the winner of the Marian Engel Award for excellence in fiction for a body of work; a Finalist in the 2000 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Prize for fiction; and on the longlist for the 2002 Orange Prize for Fiction. It also won the Commonwealth Best Book Prize in the Canada/ Caribbean region.

Ms. Badami currently resides in Vancouver where she is working on her third novel, Can You Hear the Night Bird Sing. For more information on Anita Rau Badami, visit her website at www.anitaraubadami.net.

Vijaya Lakshmi

Vijay Lakshmi was born and educated in India and came to the United States as a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Yale University. Lakshmi’s short stories, published in such journals as Wasafiri (London), Orbis (London), Paris Transcontinental (Paris), Amelia (US) Journal of Indian Writing in English (India), and South Asian Review (US), have been gathered with a novella as Pomegranate Dreams and Other Stories. Author of a book, Virginia Woolf as Literary Critic, and of about 20 scholarly articles, she writes stories about the psychological conflicts and moral dilemmas of immigrant women settling in western societies. Her collection portrays the alienation and the pathos of the life lived in a contemporary metropolis, whether American, European, or Indian. Her awards include a Senior Fulbright Fellowship at Yale University, NEH Summer Fellowship, the English-Speaking Union’s Travel and Research Grant, and Editor’s Prize from Orbis (U.K.) for "Touchline." Lakshmi's stories have been translated into French and Chinese. She has been invited to give readings at the universities of Heidelberg, Huelva, Padua, Orleans, and Delhi. Widely traveled in Europe and the Far East, a mother of two grown-up children, she lives with her husband in Glenside, and teaches at the Community College of Philadelphia.

Ved Mehta

Ved Mehta was born in Lahore, Punjab, in British India and was mostly educated in the United States and Britain. Although blind since age four, Ved Mehta has gone on to become one of the most versatile contemporary men of letters. Encouraged by the success of his early autobiography, Face to Face (1957), Mehta went on to publish more than a score of books, including many experimental books in which he created his own brand of intellectual journalism. He has written with equal felicity about events and personalities in India, Great Britain, and the United States, and about more abstract matters, such as philosophy, religion, and linguistics. Mehta has received much special acclaim for his series of eleven books with the omnibus title Continents of Exile. The series was launched with Daddyji (1972) and concluded this year with The Red Letters, a delicately crafted portrait of his father, a distinguished Indian public health officer. From 1961 till 1994, he was a staff writer and reporter on The New Yorker magazine and in recent years he has taught writing and history at Yale University and Williams College, among others. He is married, father of two daughters, and lives in New York City.

For more information on Ved Mehta, visit his website at www.vedmehta.com.

Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee attended the universities of Calcutta and Baroda, where she earned a master's degree in English and Ancient Indian Culture. She came to America in 1961 to attend the Iowa Writers Workshop and earned her master of fine arts and Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. She was teaching English at McGill University in Montreal when she began writing fiction.

Her fiction includes Wife, An Invisible Woman, Darkness, The Middleman and Other Stories, Jasmine, The Holder of the World, and Desirable Daughters. Her latest novel, released in the Fall of 2004, is entitled The Tree Bride. Ms. Mukherjee’s non fiction works include Political Culture and Leadership in India and Regionalism in Indian Perspective.

Bharati Mukherjee won the National Book Critics' Circle Award for best fiction for The Middleman and Other Stories. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University, New York University, and Queens College, and is currently professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley.

Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi was born in Mumbai in 1977 and was educated in India, England and America. He holds an MA in international journalism and an MS in mass communications, and has worked in the past as a chef, kennel boy and storyteller. A past contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle and Elle, he divides his time between the San Francisco Bay area and Bombay. The Last Song of Dusk, winner of the Betty Trask Award, is his first novel.

For more information on Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, visit his website at www.siddharths.com.

Indu Sundaresan

Indu Sundaresan was born and raised in India. After an undergraduate degree in economics from India, Ms. Sundaresan came to the U.S. for graduate school at the University of Delaware. She started writing fiction seriously in 1993 and her short fiction has appeared in The Vincent Brothers Review and on iVillage.com.

Indu Sundaresan is the author of two novels, The Twentieth Wife and its sequel, The Feast of Roses. Both novels are based on the life of this almost-abandoned child named Mehrunnisa who grows up to become Empress Nur Jahan and the most powerful woman in India's Mughal dynasty.

Indu's work has been translated into 10 languages, and she is the winner of the 2003 Washington State Book Award for The Twentieth Wife.

Ms. Sundaresan currently lives in Seattle, Washington where she is working on a third novel set in India during the 1940s.

For more information on Indu's work, please visit her Web site at: www.indusundaresan.com

Smita Turakhia

Mrs. Turakhia’s portfolio includes illustrations for Finders Keepers?, a multi-award-winning children’s book set in India and The Journey to the Truth, an award-winning CD-ROM that depicted for the first time the messages and metaphors of the Bhagavad Gita in the Warli folk art style of India.

A graduate of Nirmala Niketan, Mumbai, India, Mrs. Turakhia also studied fine arts for two years at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and studied under one of India’s Gold Medal artists. She currently resides in Lake Jackson, Texas with her husband and two daughters.

T.S. Tirumurti

T.S.Tirumurti is an officer of the Indian Foreign Service currently posted as Counsellor in the Indian Embassy in Washington DC. He has earlier been in Geneva, Cairo, Gaza and Director in the Foreign Secretary’s Office in New Delhi. His first book was a travelogue about his travels in Tibet – ‘Kissing the Heavens – The Kailash Manasarovar Yatra.’

Neela Vaswani

Tim Ward

Tim Ward spent six years traveling through remote parts of the far-east, including India, Nepal, Indonesia, China and Tibet. He visited temples and monasteries, desert ashrams and mountain top holy places, seeking out monks and mystics. Arousing the Goddess is Ward’s third and most sensual book derived from his travels. It chronicles his adventures traveling across North India, including a search for statues of the Buddha's meeting with the Earth Goddess, a tantric love affair and in Calcutta, his encounters with the Goddess Kali.

Tim Ward's other books are: What the Buddha Never Taught, a best-seller about life in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand; and The Great Dragon's Fleas, a collection of stories about holy men and women he encountered in Asia. Savage Breast, due out in 2005, is "a man's search for the Goddess" among the ruins and temples of ancient Greece and the Near East.

Tim Ward lives in Bethesda Maryland with his family, and is president of Intermedia Communications Training Inc. He teaches international officials, researchers, experts and governments how to give effective interviews with the news media, and this work regularly takes him back to Asia.

For more information on Ward’s work, please visit his website at www.timwardsbooks.com.

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Geeta Citygirl

Geeta Citygirl (SALAAM Theatre, Artistic Director) is a professional actor, director, producer, writer, dramaturg and foremost a proud New Yorker who loves her family more than words can express.

A recognized and respected theater aficionado, Geeta Citygirl has acted professionally in all types of venues from Musical Theatre to Shakespeare to Cabaret -- from drama to comedy. Her work as a director has been seen in numerous theatres throughout NYC and most recently, in Hollywood, CA. Ms. Citygirl teaches master classes, seminars and workshops as well as currently offers limited private acting coaching sessions and occasional group classes to adults, teens and children.

For more information on Geeta Citygirl, visit her website at www.geetacitygirl.com.

Satish Menon

For more information on Satish Menon, visit his website at www.bhavum.com.

Rohit Colin Rao

Rohit Colin Rao is a 28-year old Indian-American filmmaker in the Washington, DC area. Born in India, Rao immigrated to the United States at the age of 8. An artist of many mediums, Rao originally started with music and painting. His debut short, Blocks, is a poignant and philosophical film about the struggles and celebrations of 5 characters. Blocks led him to Los Angeles where he wrote and directed his award-winning short film, Someone and Someone, Inc. Rao moved back to his DC metro hometown in 2003 to start Carousel30, an advertising and marketing communications agency. He resides in Rockville, MD with his wife and daughter where he continues to make films, commercials, and corporate communication videos.

For more information on Rohit, visit his website at http://carousel30.com

Dr. Karni Bhati currently teaches in the English department at Furman University, Greenville, SC. His research and teaching interests are in South Asian Cultural Studies; in specific, he teaches and writes on the literatures of the subcontinent (in English and in other languages which he read mostly in translation). He is currently revising a manuscript on twentieth century literary representations of the national community in India, and is working on a collection of poems in English. Before coming to the US, Dr. Bhati taught at the Sikkim Government College in Gangtok, and at M.S. University, Baroda.

Nalini Natarajan is the author of Handbook of Twentieth-century Literatures of India and Woman and Indian Modernity. She holds a doctorate from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, U.K. Her work has been anthologized in prominent publications such as Scattered Hegemonies, Feminist Theory and the Body, The Postcolonial Jane Austen, Signposts: Gender Issues in Post-independence India and others. She is Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico and has previously been on the faculty at Miranda House, Delhi as well as the Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is currently working on a book of intercultural essays on PR and India.

Kamal D. Verma is the author of The Indian Imagination: Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English (St. Martin's Press, 2000) and The Vision of "Love's Rare Universe": A Study of Shelley's Epipsychidion (University Press of America, 1995). He has also published essays on William Blake, Hermann Hesse, Sri Aurobindo and Mulk Raj Anand. He is the Editor of the South Asian Review, a scholarly journal published by the South Asian Literary Association. He received his Ph. D. in English from the University of Alberta in 1974 and is currently Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown.