Charis Presents South to South: Writing South Asia in the American South, a reading and panel discussion featuring: Khem K. Aryal (Editor), Anjali Enjeti (contributor), Rukmini Kalamangalam (contributor), Soniah Kamal (contributor), Aruni Kashyap (contributor), and moderated by Anar Parikh. This anthology of eight short stories and eight narrative essays depicts diverse facets of the South Asian experience in the American South. Some of them relate to the proverbial longing for what the immigrants have left behind, while the others spotlight the immigrants’ struggles to reconcile with realities they did not sign up for.
In Chaitali Sen’s “The Immigrant,” Dhruv is unable to talk about a lost boy because he feels “as if he were trapping the boy with his story,” as if the lost boy’s story were his own story of getting lost in a foreign country. In Hasanthika Sirisena’s “Pine,” a Christmas tree becomes more than “only a pine tree with decorations thrown on it” when Lakshmi’s ex-husband lets her know he is converting to Christianity “to get ahead in this country.” Aruni Kashyap’s “Nafisa Ali’s Life, Love, and Friendships, Before and after the Travel Ban” tell a post-2016 immigrant story in which love is baffling. In “Gettysburg,” Kirtan Nautiyal asks, how does an immigrant become part of the new country’s history? Soniah Kamal’s essay “Writing the Immigrant Southern in the New New South” reflects on what it means to be an immigrant writer and if one can write from two places at once. Together, the stories and essays in the anthology compose a mosaic of South Asian lived experiences in the American South.
Khem Aryal (Editor, “Laxman Sir in America”) is a writer, editor, and a teacher of writing. His fiction has appeared in such journals as The Pinch, Isthmus, Reed, South Carolina Review, and Pangyrus. His debut short story collection, The In-Betweeners, will be out in September this year from Braddock Avenue Books. His chapbook, His Grandma Blues, was published from Belle Point Press last November as part of its Mid-South Prose Series. He is an associate professor of creative writing at Arkansas State University, where he also serves as Creative Materials Editor of Arkansas Review.
Anjali Enjeti (“Drinking Chai to Savannah”) is an Atlanta-based former attorney, journalist, and organizer. She is the author of Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change, and The Parted Earth. She is the winner of the Georgia Author of the Year for first novel, a gold medal recipient for Best Regional Nonfiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and was a finalist for the Townsend Prize for fiction. Her other writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing in the MFA programs at Antioch University in Los Angeles and Reinhardt University.
Rukmini Kalamangalam (“Slow Fruiting”) is an Indian American poet from Houston, Texas, with roots across the South. In the past, she has worked in empowerment spaces with South Asian survivors of violence, incarcerated survivors of gender-based violence, and at-risk girls. She believes deeply in the power of people to make meaningful, sustainable change in our world. She is a student of abolition and an enthusiastic beginner at plant identification.
Soniah Kamal is an award-winning novelist, essayist, and public speaker. Her most recent novel, Unmarriageable: Pride & Prejudice in Pakistan, is a Financial Times Readers’ Best Book of 2019, a 2019 ‘Books All Georgians Should Read,’ a 2020 Georgia Author of the Year for Literary Fiction nominee, is shortlisted for the 2020 Townsend Award for Fiction, is a New York Public Library, an NPR Code Switch 2019 Summer Read Pick and People’s Magazine pick. Soniah’s TEDx talk is about second chances and ‘We are the Ink’, her address at a U.S. Citizenship Oath Ceremony, talks about immigrants and the real American Dreams. Soniah’s work has appeared in critically acclaimed anthologies and publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, and more. Twitter and Insta @soniahkamal www.soniahkamal.com
Aruni Kashyap (“Nafisa ALi’s Life, Love, and Friendships, Before and After the Travel Ban”) writes in Assamese & English. He is the author of two books of fiction, including His Father’s Disease (Gaudy Boy Books NY), and a poetry collection. Winner of fellowships from NEA and the Charles Wallace Trust, he is the Director of the CWP at the University of Georgia, Athens.
Anar Parikh is a South Asian American scholars-practitioner whose social justice commitments were bred in youth organizing spaces in Charlotte, NC (her hometown). She is invested in abolitionist, anti-Hindutva, and radical Black & Indigenous feminist approaches to liberation and social justice. Anar has a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from Brown University.
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