with Chandrahas Choudhury, Sanam Maher, and Dini Parayitam

Prairie Lights Bookstore

Join the International Writing Program for a reading from prize-winning authors & IWP Summer Institute mentors Chandrahas Choudhury, Sanam Maher, and Dini Parayitam! This is the fourth and final year of the Summer Institute, a creative writing and intercultural exchange program for Pakistani, Indian, and US-based college-age students supported by the US Embassy in Islamabad.

Chandrahas Choudhury is the author of three novels: Clouds (2019), Days of My China Dragon (2019), and Arzee the Dwarf (2013), the editor of India: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (2010), and most recently the author of a book of literary criticism, My Country Is Literature. He has written essays, reportage, and literary criticism for the Wall Street Journal, Condé Nast Traveler, the Washington Post, and Mint, and lectures widely on writing and the Indian novel.

Sanam Maher is a journalist based in Karachi, Pakistan. She covers stories on Pakistan’s art and culture, religious minorities, and women. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Caravan, BBC, and the Guardian, amongst others. Her first book, A Woman Like Her: The Short Life of Qandeel Baloch, an investigation into the murder of Pakistan’s first social media celebrity, was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2020 by The New York Times and The New Yorker.

Dini Parayitam has an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. Her short fiction has been published in The Iowa Review, Boston Review and BOMB Magazine, among other places. She was an Emerging Writing Fellow at Yale-NUS College (Singapore) and a KALAKARS (NYC) Fellow for Scriptwriting. She is working on her debut novel in Austin, Texas.