Gaiutra Bahadur

Gaiutra Bahadur is a Guyanese-American essayist, critic and journalist who writes frequently about literature, history, memory, migration, and gender. Her book Coolie Woman, a personal history of indenture, was shortlisted in 2014 for the Orwell Prize, the British literary prize for artful political writing, and the OCM Bocas nonfiction prize. A former daily newspaper reporter in the United States and a Harvard Nieman Fellow at 32, she is a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books and Dissent Magazine. She currently teaches writing and journalism as an assistant professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at Rutgers University in Newark.
The recipient of literary residencies from the MacDowell Artists Colony and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy, Bahadur is the winner of a national award for creative prose from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for American feminist writers and is a two-time winner of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Award for creative prose. Her work as an independent scholar in the humanities has been recognized and supported with fellowships from the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, the Society of Authors in London and the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library.
Photo credit: Credit line: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey, The MacDowell Colony, 2016).