You Have Given Me a Country by Neela Vaswani

And, that through letters they find a way to share their true selves with another kindred spirit. Gigi Amateau: What I love most about Same Sun Here is the depth with which the spiritual, political, and creative lives of Meena and River are portrayed.

She loves paleontology, the Indian railway system, female detectives on television, goats, bats, bad-tempered camels, her husband, and online Boggle. She is left-handed although she plays the fiddle and knits right-handed. She has also dressed Armani models, delivered telephone books, worked cattle round-ups and barbed wire fencing, ripped tickets at a movie theatre, been a maid, a stage manager, a secretary, a prop girl for two independent movies, and driven an ice cream truck. Her first job was at a one-hour photo booth on Long Island. Vaswani has held a number of waitressing jobs, from chicken shacks to comedy clubs, and she paid off her school loans by cocktail waitressing at a fondue bar in NYC. By the time Vaswani was eighteen, her family had lived in thirteen homes and traveled to twenty-five countries on doctor swaps and teaching tours. Her father is Sindhi-Indian and her mother is Irish-Catholic. An education activist in India and the United States, Vaswani is founder of the Storylines Project with the New York Public Library. in Cultural Studies, lives in New York City, and teaches at Manhattanville College’s MFA in Writing Program and Spalding University’s brief-residency MFA in Writing Program. She has been a Visiting-Writer-in-Residence at more than 100 institutions, among them: Knox College, 92nd Street Y (Tribeca), the Jimenez-Porter House at the University of Maryland, Kentucky Women Writers Conference, the Whitney Museum in New York City, and IIIT Hyderabad, India. Her fiction and nonfiction have been widely anthologized and published in journals such as Epoch, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner. She is also co-author of the Middle Grade novel-in-letters, Same Sun Here. Henry Prize, the ForeWord Book of the Year gold medal, the Nautilus Book Award gold medal, and many other honors.

She is the recipient of the American Book Award, an O. Neela Vaswani is author of the short story collection Where the Long Grass Bends, and a memoir, You Have Given Me a Country.

You Have Given Me a Country by Neela Vaswani