Neela Vaswani is the author of the short story collection "Where the Long Grass Bends" and a memoir "You Have Given Me a Country". She has also co-authored the Middle Grade novel-in-letters, "Same Sun Here". Her works have been widely anthologized and published in prestigious journals such as Epoch, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner. Vaswani has won a number of awards including the trophy at the 57th Grammy awards in the Best Children`s Album category for `I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World (Malala Yousafzai)`.
Early Life of Neela Vaswani
She was born to a Sindhi-Indian father and Irish-Catholic mother. By the time she was eighteen, her family had lived in thirteen homes and travelled to twenty-five countries on doctor swaps and teaching tours. Vaswani is left-handed. She has a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies.
Career of Neela Vaswani
Vaswani 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 including 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. She is an education activist in India and the United States. She has founded the Storylines Project with the New York Public Library.
Before becoming an author and teacher, Vaswani has held a number of waitressing jobs. Her first job was at a one-hour photo booth on Long Island. She paid off her school loans by cocktail waitressing at a fondue bar in NYC. To earn pocket money and support her education, she has also dressed Armani models, delivered telephone books, worked cattle round-ups and barbed wire fencing, been a maid, a stage manager, a secretary and a prop girl for two independent films
Awards of Neela Vaswani
•She is the recipient of the American Book Award.
•She has earned O. Henry Prize.
•She was honoured with the ForeWord Book of the Year gold medal.
•She won the Nautilus Book Award gold medal.
•She has also earned an Audie Award.
