Misha Rai is the 2018-2021 Kenyon Review Fellow in Prose at Kenyon College, where she is at work on her novel-in-progress and other short prose, including a collection of essays. She teaches multi-genre creative writing and edits for the Kenyon Review.
Her prose has been awarded fellowships or scholarships from The MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Dana Award in the Novel Category for her novel-in-progress, and the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women's Studies. She has been a 2016-2017 Edward H. and Mary C. Kingsbury Fellow and the recipient of the 2015 George M. Harper Award.
Misha Rai's essay, "To Learn About Smoke One Must First Light a Fire," won the 2018 Dogwood Literary Prize in Nonfiction and was picked by Rebecca Solnit as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays, 2019 edition. Her essays have also been finalists for the Sonora Review Essay Prize and The Iowa Review Awards. Her prose has been published in a number of places.
Her writing often focuses on Transnational Stories, Historical and Political Fiction, Literary Suspense, Exile–whether self imposed or through banishment–and grapples with the unsettling realities of displacement, and memory.
She was born in Sonipat, Haryana and brought up in India, where she first worked as a journalist for the English language daily, The Pioneer, and later for the National Human Rights Commission, The International Labour Organization, and on projects run by the Ministry of Women & Child and UNICEF .
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