Holi Celebration at Belmont Books

Join us for a celebration of Holi and show you love for some great local authors!

Anjali Mitter Duva is an Indian American writer raised in France. She is the author of the bestselling historical novel Faint Promise of Rain. She is also a co-founder of Chhandika, a non-profit organization that teaches and presents India’s classical storytelling kathak dance. Educated at Brown University and MIT, Anjali is a frequent speaker at conferences, festivals, libraries, schools and other cultural institutions. She was a finalist for a 2018 Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. In her spare time, she runs a book club for teens and the Arlington Author Salon, a quarterly literary series. She lives in the Boston area with her husband and two daughters, and is currently at work on her second novel.

Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a physician and writer with work in Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Electric Lit, The Millions, Joyland, Michigan Quarterly Review and elsewhere. Her poetry and prose juxtapose Hindu epics, other myths and histories, and the survival of sexual harassment and racialized sexual violence by diverse women of color. She has received a MacDowell Colony fellowship, Sewanee Writers Conference scholarship and Henfield award for her writing.

Rishi Reddi is the author of Karma and Other Stories and winner of the 2008 PEN New England / L.L. Winship prize for fiction. Her short stories have been aired on National Public Radio, performed at New York City’s Symphony Space, and published in Best American Short Stories, Harvard Review, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals. Her essays and translations have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Asian American Literary Review, and the Partisan Review. She has received grants and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, United States Department of State, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Vermont Studio Center. She lives in Cambridge, MA.

Kirun Kapur‘s first book, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist, was awarded the 2013 Antivenom Poetry Award and was a finalist for the Mass Book Prize, the Julie Suk Award and several other prizes. It was published in 2015 by Elixir Press. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Poetry International, FIELD, Prarie Schooner and others. She has taught creative writing at Boston University, Brandeis University, and has been granted fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center and McDowell Colony. Additional honors include the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize in Poetry, the Nazim Hikmet Prize and a Glenna Luschei award. In 2015, NBCNews named her to their list of Asian-American Poets to Watch. Kirun currently teaches at Amherst College and serves as the Poetry Editor for The Drum Literary Magazine.