People & Principles

Managing Editor | Kunjana Parashar

KUNJANA PARASHAR is a poet from Mumbai. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. Her manuscript They Gather Around Me, the Animals, selected by Diane Seuss, has won the 2024 Barbara Stevens Poetry Book Award. She has received the Toto Funds the Arts award and the Deepankar Khiwani Memorial Prize.

Editor | Yashasvi Vachhani

YASHASVI VACHHANI is a poet, editor, and educator. She facilitates creative writing and reading programmes for children across ages.

From 2017 to 2020, she curated the children’s literature section of the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, and went on to curate the literature section of the festival in 2022 and 2023. She is currently the Programme Manager at Mcubed Library.

Her work has been featured in SWWIM Miami—where her poem Ghazal for My Thunder was selected as one of the top ten poems for their Sing the Body issue—Of Brave Hearts and Dry Tongues, and Singapore Unbound.

She is one of the founders of The Osmosis Poetry Prize, a prize for Indian poets, and the founder of Odd Yellow Workshops—a workshopping space dedicated to the joys of the language arts, where she conducts workshops for children and adults alike.

She can usually be found at the library down the street or with a cup of tea at her favourite café.

Editor | Vasvi Kejriwal

VASVI KEJRIWAL is a writer, editor and former lawyer. She runs Fresh Mint: an initiative that aims to deepen access to the history and craft of poetry. Her work has been shortlisted for the Troubadour International Prize, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her poems are forthcoming/appear in Rattle, Nimrod, Shō Poetry Journal, Mekong Review, SWWIM Every Day, The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Alipore Post, Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English and elsewhere. She is a mentor for young writers at Girls Write Now. She is also a Reader for Chestnut Review  and an Assistant Social Media Editor at Washington Square Review. Her writing has received funding from MVICW, and she is a MFA candidate at New York University.

Editor | Devanshi Khetarpal

DEVANSHI KHETARPAL is an MFA candidate in Fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Inklette Magazine. Her work has been published in Indiana Review, Pleiades, The Masters Review, Suspect, Public Books, The Bombay Literary Magazine, and Poetry at Sangam, among others. Her poem received an Honorable Mention for the 2024 Prufer Poetry Prize. Devanshi’s work has been supported by the Truman Capote and Sonny Mehta fellowships at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. Devanshi holds a Master’s in Comparative Literature from New York University. She is from Bhopal, and divides her time between Iowa City and New York City. 

Editor | Amal Mathew

AMAL MATHEW presently writes and reads from New Delhi where he studies Literary Arts and Creative Writing at Ambedkar University Delhi. His creative works have appeared in the nether Quarterly, VAYAVYA, Muse India and The Tiger Moth Review among other places. He hails from Thrissur, Kerala.

Editor | Ashish Kumar Singh

ASHISH KUMAR SINGH (he/him) is a queer Indian poet whose work has appeared in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Frontier Poetry, Grain Magazine, Chestnut Review, Fourteen Poems, Cutleaf Journal, Atlanta Review and elsewhere. Currently, he lives in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh.

DEBMALYA BANDYOPADHYAY (he/him) is a writer and mathematician based in Birmingham, UK. He is in the 2025 cohort of the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program. He is the runner-up for the UK Coaches Poetry Slam 2025, was a finalist for Sweet Literary’s Poetry Prize, Sophon Lit’s Poetry Contest, and the Briefly Write Poetry Prize, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. His poems, translations, and essays have appeared in Chestnut Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Rust & Moth, Propel, and elsewhere. He is often in parks confabulating with local birds.

LAVANYA ARORA is an independent researcher and writer exploring biology, culture, and food through stories, poetry, and narrative-driven articles. They find solace in nature, cooking and eating well balanced meals, and Ghibli movies (not the AI trend people are calling Ghibli art). Their work has previously appeared in Conde Nast Traveller, enthucutlet, Galway and Belfast Pride Festivals, Third Space: Anthology of South Asian Poets, Usawa Literary Review, gulmohur quarterly, and elsewhere. They were a part of the Himalayan Emerging Writers Residency 2024. Other than being perpetually online at @lavaurora on Instagram, they divide their time between Uttarakhand and Bengaluru.

SANDIP BAIDYA is a poet originally from Tripura but now based in Delhi. He is an alumnus of the Summer Institute IWP program from the University of Iowa (2019), where he spent a wonderful summer learning the craft of poetry and fiction writing. His poems have been published in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Yearbook of Indian Poetry 2022, scroll.in, & Beyond the Panorama. He was shortlisted for the Deepankar Khiwani Memorial Prize.

Sandip loves art and reports that all the header sections of his work journal pages are filled with doodles.

SHREYASI TRIPATHI is a writer and community builder from Delhi. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines like Vayavya and Pashchyanti Magazine. She also contributed poems on the theme of love and revolution to a feminist poetry anthology by One Future Collective titled How to Share The World. She hosts poetreeees picnics every month in Delhi where people gather around poems and trees. When she is not writing, tending to her plants and pets, or gathering people around poems, she is a technology policy lawyer. You can find her at @poetreeees on Instagram. 

Editor | Kinjal Sethia

KINJAL SETHIA is a writer based in Pune. Her work has been published in nether Quarterly, Tahoma Literary Review, The Bangalore Review, Out of Print, among other places.  She is the co-founder of The Osmosis Poetry Prize.

Editor | Jigar Brahmbhatt

JIGAR BRAHMBHATT, when not busy with his software development job, can be found thinking about stories. Everything that happens to him is fodder. So nothing in life is good or bad, but yet another opportunity for a workable story. He feels he has found his zen thus.

Editor | Venkataraghavan S.

VENKATARAGHAVAN S. is a writer and actor. His non-fiction book The Origin Story of India’s States was published by Penguin in 2021. His short fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine and Pratham Books. He was awarded the 2023 Neev Fellowship for Children’s Book Creators; his middle grade novel-in-progress is set in the Madras Zoo during World War II. He wrote, directed, produced and performed in Brachio: The Story of a Lighthouse, a play for children based on principles of social justice and equity, which premiered in 2023 in Bengaluru. Brachio is also forthcoming from HarperCollins as a chapter book for children.

Editor | Uday Kanungo

UDAY KANUNGO (He/Him) is a short-story writer and a PhD Student at the English Department of Arizona State University. He hopes to remain in the first role forever, and that the second concludes in time. His research interests involve philosophy of aesthetics and sense-perception in literary works. He is also a translator from Hindi and Odia to English, and his non-fiction has appeared in various Indian publications such as The Hindu and Newslaundry. In 2022, he won the Toto Award for Creative Writing in English, and his fiction has been published in The Bombay Review and The Indian Quarterly.

Editor | Anjali Alappat

ANJALI ALAPPAT is a writer and editor who has worked in journalism, publishing, and content creation. She’s the author of two books, Discovering Dinosaurs and Mina Makes a Dash with Pratham Books. She loves exploring the intersections of art, culture, history, social dynamics, and science. She’s also addicted to coffee and Oxford commas, and will not be seeking treatment for either of these issues. She is also the host of Arcx, India’s first podcast that focuses solely on South Asian sci-fi, speculative fiction, and fantasy authors.

Editor | Dyuti Mishra

DYUTI MISHRA is a writer and translator based in Berlin. She is currently working on her first novel Side Effects. Her work has been featured in Scroll, The Hindu, India Today, Vogue, GQ, Femina and other publications. When she is not fighting for survival against the German winters, she enjoys reading fiction, watching trashy shows, vintage shopping on eBay and doing her cat’s bidding.

Managing Editor (Poetry) | Mani Rao

MANI RAO is the author of twelve collections of poetry, including So That You Know (HarperCollins, July 2025). Her books in translation from Sanskrit mediate between ancient India and today—the canonical Bhagavad Gita, the poetry and plays of Kalidasa, and Saundarya Lahari, the esoteric hymn to Shakti.

After studying literature in the early 80’s Madras, she earned her bread and preserve as an advertising and television professional for two decades in Mumbai, New Zealand and Hong Kong. A resetting of life-goals led her back to the world of learning– she then did an MFA from UNLV and a PhD in Religious Studies from Duke University. Researching mantra experience in tantric communities, she discovered new mantras and continuing revelations for Living Mantra: Mantra, Deities and Visionary Experience (Cham Springer, 2019). She lives in Bangalore with her parents and partner with whom she enjoys traveling off the beaten track.

Managing Editor (Fiction) | Jayasree Kalathil

JAYASREE KALATHIL spent decades as a researcher and activist in mental health and antiracism. She currently strives to live a writerly life in a village in an English forest, easily distracted by heather, birds, and fungi. She is the author of a children’s book, The Sackclothman. Her translations from Malayalam have won the JCB Prize for Literature (S. Hareesh’s Moustache), the Crossword Book Award for Translation (N. Prabhakaran’s Diary of a Malayali Madman), and the V. Abdulla Memorial Translation Award (Sheela Tomy’s Valli). Valli was also shortlisted for the American Literary Translators Association National Translation Award and received a jury commendation from Muse India-GSP Rao Translation Award. She is a board member of the South Asian Literature in Translation (SALT) project and a mentor on the ALTA mentorship programme.

Editor (Poetry) | Pathikrit

PATHIKRIT grew up in Kolkata. His work has appeared in Kweli, the Northwest Review, the Wire, the New York Times, and elsewhere. He was the 2023 First Book Resident at Tin House. He holds degrees in geology, biology, and human-computer interaction, and he is currently working toward an MFA in fiction at the New Writers Project in Austin, Texas. More at pathikrit.in.

Editor (Fiction) | Uma Shirodkar

UMA SHIRODKAR lives in Mumbai and translates primarily from Marathi into English. She was a 2022 South Asia Speaks Fellow and her translations have appeared in Guernica Magazine and Hakara Journal. When she’s not inhabiting multilingual worlds, she loves reading unhealthy amounts of horror and macabre fiction in English and Marathi, learning new languages, and listening to the same 1760 songs on loop (though not necessarily in that order). She writes and translates @lyrically_obscure on Instagram.

Managing Editor (Poetry) | Pervin Saket

PERVIN SAKET was a 2024 writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. She was awarded the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize 2021, and was the inaugural Fellow for the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, 2021. She is the curator of Literature at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival. Her books include the novel ‘Urmila’, the poetry collection ‘A Tinge of Turmeric’ and a series of 10 landmark biographies-in-verse for children, featuring Indian women in science and sports. The legends say she has been with TBLM since Zero BC, give or take a century.