Sejal Shah is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and teacher of writing. Her debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, was an NPR Best Book of 2020 and included in over thirty most-anticipated lists including those from Electric Literature, Lit Hub, the Los Angeles Times, The Millions, Ms. Magazine, and PEN America. The recipient of fellowships from Blue Mountain Center, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Kundiman, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, Sejal is also the author of the forthcoming story collection, How to Make Your Mother Cry: fictions. Find her online at www.sejal-shah.com and @SejalShahWrites on Instagram and Twitter.
Jan/Feb 2019
Even If You Can’t See It: Invisible Disability and Neurodiversity
“Yet why not say what happened?” —Robert Lowell I was in my midtwenties and studying in an MFA program when my mind began to slip. That fall, I survived my […]
Summer 2015
Ritual as Resolution: Amarnath Ravva’s American Canyon
A few years ago at the 92nd Street Y in New York, Leslie Marmon Silko, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Toni Morrison discussed Silko’s idea, voiced in the opening of her groundbreaking book Ceremony, that sometimes there is no resolution except ceremony.
Fall 2013
Deluxe
One She is the last of her siblings who is alive; Mother says she is tired. (Ba will never say she is tired.) Ba is my mother’s mother.
Fall 2011
Street Scene
Parisians call this neighborhood mixed. Mixed is code; it means immigrants. Think Brooklyn, Caitlin says. We are in the 20th Arrondissement, near Père Lachaise. I am here to see the […]
Fall 2010
Bird
I have not been to Cobb’s Hill since last summer, when I returned to Rochester for a wedding. I was with A. We had each flown in from the larger […]