Neelanjana Banerjee’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, The Liner, PANK Magazine, The Rumpus, World Literature Today, The Literary Review, Asian Pacific American Journal, Nimrod, A Room of One’s Own, Desilit, and the anthologies: Desilicious (Arsenal Press, 2003), The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (HarperCollins India, 2012), and Good Girls Mary Doctors: South Asian Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion (Aunt Lute Books, September 2016). She is a co-editor of Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (University of Arkansas Press, 2010) and The Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes and Shifts of Los Angeles (Tia Chucha Press, March 2016). She is currently based in Los Angeles, where she is the Managing Editor of Kaya Press, and teaches writing in the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA and through Writing Workshops Los Angeles.
From the Archives: Neelanjana Banerjee talks with Helen Oyeyemi about why she’s drawn to supernatural subjects (but not “magical realism”), why vampire stories are really about race, and how to write stories that will freak your readers out.
Neelanjana Banerjee talks with Helen Oyeyemi about why she’s drawn to supernatural subjects (but not “magical realism”), why vampire stories are really about race, and how to write stories that will freak your readers out.
Neela Banerjee talks with Kathryn Ma, the first Asian American to win the Iowa Prize in that contest’s 40-year history. Ma channels rage and its antidote, humor, in her debut collection, All That Work and Still No Boys, which features unapologetically Asian American characters who don’t do any cooking or talking to ghosts.
I had to go four or five pages into my junk email folder to find one. It was from a Dr. Obadiah Maliafia of the Central Bank of Nigeria. The email says that my $10.7 million in overdue inheritance funds: “HAS BEEN GAZZETED TO BE RELEASED TO YOU VIA THE FOREIGN REMMITANCE DEPARTMENT OF OUR BANK.”
After reading Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s debut novel I Do Not Come to You By Chance (Hyperion, May 2009), the missive from Dr. Maliafia read like a finely tuned piece of art: the formal language, the capital letters, the amount of money – a perfect example of the 419 email scam.
