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Navdeep Singh Dhillon is an author, adjunct professor, a former linguist in the U.S. Navy, ESL teacher in China, and door-to-door knife salesman (yes, with this face!). He is co-founder of IshqInABackpack, a narrative travel blog. Born in England, raised in Tanzania, Nigeria, Dubai, and Fresno, California, he is a Punjabi boy at heart. When he isn't writing or grading, he is cosplaying across the fandoms with his two nerdy kiddos, while his wife looks on helplessly.
SUNNY G’S SERIES OF RASH DECISIONS is his debut novel. Adiba Jaigirdar is the author of The Henna Wars and Hani & Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating. A Bangladeshi/Irish writer and teacher, she has an MA in Postcolonial Studies from the University of Kent, England and a BA in English and History from UCD, Ireland. All of her writing is aided by tea, and a healthy dose of Janelle Monáe and Hayley Kiyoko. When not writing, she is probably ranting about the ills of colonialism, playing video games, or expanding her overflowing lipstick collection. She can be found at adibajaigirdar.com or @adiba_j on Twitter and @dibs_j on Instagram.
Intisar Khanani Over the years, she's considered different occupations based on how her name, Intisar, has been mispronounced. There’s “Intistar” (Galactic Space Commander?), “Interstar” (Lowly Space Shuttle Captain?), and “Inastar” (Nuclear Fusion, here I come!), just to list a few.
So how her name is really pronounced is pretty much how it’s written: In-ti-sar Kha-na-ni. Intisar was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and grew up a nomad, with multiple stints living in Saudi Arabia, boarding school in New Hampshire, and college split between Minnesota and Colorado. Her family is from Pakistan, and she still has extended family there. She, her husband, and two young daughters live in Cincinnati, Ohio. Until a few years ago, she worked with the Cincinnati Health Department on projects to improve community health, which was as close as she could get to saving the world. Now she focuses her time on two passions: raising her family and writing. Sayed M. Masood grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, and currently lives in Sacramento, California. There have been plenty of stops in between though. He's a first generation immigrant, twice over. He's been a citizen of three different countries and lived in nine cities. He is, as Goethe, said, “nothing but a wanderer […] on this earth.”Living among different people, in different countries at fascinating times in their histories, has shaped both his view of the world and his writing. Ultimately, human beings are the same everywhere (despite the fact that they tell themselves, everywhere, that they are different from each other), and the theme of this fundamental human unity informs everything he writes.
As to his life outside of writing, he went to the William and Mary School of Law, and before that attended the University of Toronto, where he studied English Literature. He is currently practicing as an attorney and must “measure out his life in coffee spoons” on a daily basis. Anuradha D. Rajurkar is the national recipient of the SCBWI Emerging Voices Award for her contemporary debut
novel, American Betiya. Born and raised in the Chicago area to South Asian immigrant parents, Anuradha earned two degrees from Northwestern University, and for many years had the joy of being a public school teacher by day, writer by night. Nowadays, when she’s not writing or reading, you can find Anuradha hiking the shores of Lake Michigan with her family, obsessing over her garden, watching old horror flicks with her sons, eating too many baked yummies, or roguishly knitting sweaters without their patterns. She hopes her stories will inspire teens to embrace their unique identities and inner badass despite outside pressures and cultural expectations. American Betiya is her first novel. American Betiya releases on March 9, 2021 by Knopf Books for Young Readers | Penguin Random House. |
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