2016 District Lit Readers' Choice Award

District Lit has announced the winners of the 2016 Readers’ Choice Awards in poetry and fiction. Writers published in District Lit in 2015 were eligible to receive votes during the month of February 2016.


Poetry: Leeya Mehta with “Black Dog on the Anacostia River” (also nominated for a Pushcart Prize)

Fiction: Julia Mascioli with “Bodies”

Upcoming readings in Washington: April 14, 15th

Come join the Split This Rock Poetry Festival in Washington DC.

I'll be on two panels on 14th and 15th April, presenting new poems with a wonderful group of poets and activists from the across the world.

THURSDAY APRIL 14, 2015: 4.00-5.30 

University of CA Washington Center Auditorium (UCDC), 1608 Rhode Island Ave, DC
The Names We Carry: Poetry Inspired by Radical India 
Vidhu Aggarwal, Minal Hajratwala, Tanuja Jagernauth, Ellen Kombiyil, Shikha Malaviya, Leeya Mehta
University of California Washington Center (UCDC) Auditorium [Map]

The Names We Carry is a companion reading to the workshop Revolt: Writing Poetry Inspired by Radical India, reflecting the many names, labels, and categories we use/discard/attach to ourselves and others, throughout our lives. In this reading, poets connected to India and the Indian diaspora will share poems exploring issues of exile, imperialism, identity, caste/color discrimination, sexuality, and more. Participants from the Revolt workshop will also be asked to share select work generated with prompts meant to explore these same themes. More specifically, through this reading, we want the audience to think more deeply about what the function of activist poetry is, how it not only informs and explores, but is also a call to action. In order to engage the audience and illustrate how powerful activist poetry is, we will encourage audience participation during the reading as well, asking them to fill in words and missing phrases, to help them create and think about the different kinds of dialogues we constantly must create and reinvent in order to highlight different causes.
http://www.splitthisrock.org/programs/festival/2016-poetry-festival/program-schedule/thursday-april-14-2016/

FRIDAY APRIL 15, 2015: 11.30-1pm

Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives, 17th and M Streets, DC 20016
Physical Bodies and Poetic Bones
Diana Smith Bolton, Marlena Chertock, Leeya Mehta, Sarah Sansolo, Tyler Vile
Charles Sumner School Museum & Archives Room 101 [Map]
This panel will discuss body image and bodily integrity through the lens of female experience. Poetry carves a space that is inclusive and experimental, while still acknowledging and respecting poetic tradition and heritage. As poets, we contain multitudes beyond the straight, white, male experience. This panel will attempt to address the complex realities of the female body and identification (or rejection) of it as lived through poetry. Further, there are social and political implications for individuals whose bodies do not conform to the dominant media standard, such as through disability, racial identity, and gender identity. In recognition of emerging social justice for LGBT individuals and the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, this panel will explore how poets can channel the physical body into their poems to explore the physical and non-physical. This panel includes group discussion, poetry readings, and take-home workshop materials.
http://www.splitthisrock.org/programs/festival/2016-poetry-festival/program-schedule/friday-april-15-2016

Recording: The Abduction

Found the link to the recording of The Abduction: 

http://www.bpj.org/poems/mehta_abduction.mp3

(Published in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Spring 2014)

Black Dog on the Anacostia nominated for a Pushcart Prize

Yeh! So excited!

New Poem: HOME

Digital downloads and print editions of the Fall edition of Origins Journal out with a new poem: HOME: http://www.originsjournal.com/current-issue-fall-issue-2015/

New Poem: Black Dog on the Anacostia River

So proud to be part of this incredible issue of District Lit - many thanks to editor Diana Bolton. I wrote this poem Black Dog on the Anacostia River for a reading on the River last year as part of artist Mia Feuer’s Flooded Lecture Series. For those of you who haven't read Ian McEwan's Black Dogs, I would highly recommend it.

And ..... after being nominated for a Pushcart Prize for this poem, District Lit has announced the winners of the 2016 Readers’ Choice Awards in poetry and fiction. Writers published in District Lit in 2015 were eligible to receive votes during the month of February 2016.


Poetry: Leeya Mehta with “Black Dog on the Anacostia River”

Fiction: Julia Mascioli with “Bodies”

 

Oct 3 2015 - Save the Date! South Asian Writer's Festival

Fall for the Book & The Writer's Center Bethesda

October 3, 2015 @ 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm

Saturday, October 3, The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, will host the panel, “The Cities We Live In: New Writings from South Asia” as part of Fall for the Book. Moderator Leeya Mehta will speak with authors Kavita Daiya, Tula Goenke, and Rashmi Sadana about their ongoing projects and research. Join them starting at 2 p.m. for an afternoon of illuminating conversation.

Kavita Daiya

Kavita Daiya is Associate Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty in the Women’s Studies Program and Global Women’s Institute at George Washington University, Washington, D.C. She directs a Digital Humanities Histories of Violence and Migration initiative www.1947Partition.org and serves as Associate Editor of the South Asian Review. She has written numerous articles on modern British and postcolonial literature, gender studies, Asian American literature, and transnational cinema, and a book, Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender and National Culture in Colonial India (Philadelphia: Temple UP, [2008] 2011; New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2013).  Her scholarship dwells on violence and migration in literature and film; in its sustained commitment to how gender and sexuality shape the narratives of ethnicity, migration and rights she work on, her scholarship also contributes to debates in Gender and Sexuality Studies.  She is currently working on her second book Peripheral Secularisms.

Tula Goenka

Tula Goenka is an author, filmmaker, educator and human rights activist. With three decades of experience in the film and television industry, she has worked as a film editor with top filmmakers including Mira Nair, Spike Lee and James Ivory. She now produces and edits her own documentaries. A tenured professor at S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, she teaches courses in film production and Indian cinema, and routinely accompanies her students on month-long internships in Bombay. Her book, Not Just Bollywood: Indian Directors Speak was published in 2014 and is a series of conversations with 28 top directors from across the spectrum of Indian cinema. She is the founding director of the annual Syracuse University Human Rights Film Festival, now in its 13th year. Born and raised in India, Goenka is a cancer survivor and lives in Syracuse, New York, with her two children. More information on her book is here.

Rashmi Sadana

Rashmi Sadana is the author of English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India (University of California Press, 2012), which is an ethnography of Delhi’s literary field and the politics of language that undergird it. She is currently writing a book about urban space and forms of gendered sociality as seen through the prism of Delhi’s new metro system. She writes a regular column for the Mumbai-based newspaper, DNA, and has published essays in Public Culture, The Caravan, Public Books, Interventions, Economic and Political Weekly, and elsewhere. She is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at George Mason University.

Leeya Mehta

Leeya Mehta

Leeya Mehta has worked in international development for two decades, most recently with the World Bank’s gender group. She was a fellow at the UN University in Tokyo on human rights. She is the author of a chapbook, The Towers of Silence and was nominated for a 2016 Pushcart Prize for her poem, “The Abduction,” on identity and nationalism in contemporary India.

Fiction from South Asia: A Conversation with novelists A.X. Ahmad and Sujata Massey

October 3, 2015 @ 3:45 pm – 5:15 pm

A.X. Ahmad

Amin Ahmad, as ‘A.X. Ahmad’, is the author of two books—The Caretaker (2013 ) and The Last Taxi Ride (2014), both suspense novels from St. Martin’s Press. He is currently working on a literary novel. His short stories and essays have been published in many literary magazines and listed in Best American Essays. Ahmad was educated at Vassar College and M.I.T. He has studied writing at NYU, The New School, and Grubstreet. He has taught The Master Novel and Advanced Novel classes at The Writer’s Center for the last three years. More about him at: axahmad.com.

Sujata Massey

Sujata Massey

Sujata Massey was born in England to parents from India and Germany. She grew up mostly in the United States, graduated from the Johns Hopkins University, and worked as a newspaper journalist in Baltimore before turning to fiction. She’s recently written two historical novels about British colonial India, but before that came an 11-book mystery series set in modern Japan. Her books are published in sixteen countries and have won the Agatha and Macavity awards and been finalists for the Edgar, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark prizes. Sujata specializes in writing stories of family life and setting them against real life historical events. In her novel The Sleeping Dictionary, a young, illiterate girl who is pigeonholed as a maid rises to become a sophisticated woman of letters, and undercover spy for the freedom movement in 1930s Calcutta.