Selected by Danielle Evans as the winner of the 2021 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.

Chaitali studied at Cornell, NYU, and CUNY-Hunter College.

Some of the stories in this collection deal with the social unrest following the 2016 election, which of course has given rise to issues we are still working through. Chaitali is also an activist. For the last several years, she was a contributing editor and writer for RefuseFascism.org, a group that organized non-violent protests against the Trump regime and authored a Pledge of Resistance that was signed by Cornel West, Naomi Shihab Nye, Peter Carey, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Laura van den Berg, Lilly Wachowski, Alyssa Milano, Noam Chomsky, Chuck D, and many others. For two years, she ran an interview series in Austin called Borderless: Conversations on Art, Action, and Justice.

She has been a frequent panelist, presenter, and instructor for Writers League of Texas, Grub Street’s Muse & Marketplace Conference, Texas Book Festival, and The Asian American Writers Workshop, and was a featured writer at the New Voices Festival at Ithaca College in 2017 and the first annual Tasveer South Asian Literary Festival in Seattle in 2019.