Neela Vaswani is the author of WHERE THE LONG GRASS BENDS, a collection of short stories published by Sarabande Books in 2004. Her fiction and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Shenandoah, Epoch, the Cimarron Review, and have been anthologized in such books as The O. Henry Prize Stories: 2006, and Mixed: A Norton Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial Experience. In 1999, she won the Italo Calvino Prize. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland in 2006, and teaches in the Master of Fine Arts in Writing program at Spalding University.
Nina Simone, Sinead O’Connor, Gillian Welch, Beethoven, Bob Marley, David Bowie, Prince, The Doolittles, Yo-Yo Ma, Zakir Hussain, Bach, Ginny Hawker, Tracy Schwarz, Hobart Smith, Cameron de la Isla, Q-Tip, D’Gary, Tom Petty, Cesaria Evora, Hazel Dickens, Anne Sophie Mutter, Tim O’Brien, Taj Mahal, M.I.A., Franz Liszt, Freddy Mercury, Jean Ritchie, Sam Cooke, Andres Segovia, Sheila Kay Adams, Sufjan Stevens, Loretta Lynn. All ragas, bhajans, New Orleans jazz and blues, Bollywood tunes (especially from the 70’s), and roots music from anywhere.
All About My Mother, Map of the Human Heart, Baran, The Apu Trilogy, Split Wide Open, Bandit Queen, Sholay, In the Mood for Love, Not One Less, The Postman in the Mountains, Lagan, The Color of Paradise, Girlfight, Frida, Silkwood, Atanarjuat, The Gleaners, The True Meaning of Pictures, Fire, City of God, Jude, Harold and Maude, Bonnie and Clyde, Saraband, The Village, The Stuntman, Once, The Scent of Green Papaya, Little Miss Sunshine, Vanaja.
Prime Suspect, Homicide, ER, Law and Order, Inspector Morse, NY1.
Anything by: Amitava Kumar, Naomi Shihab Nye, D.H. Lawrence, Michael Ondaatje, Silas House, James Salter, Anne Carson, Leslie Marmon Silko, James Baldwin, Mary Hood, Rabindranath Tagore, Willa Cather, Grace Paley, Susan Sontag, John Berger, Jose Saramago, Idries Shah, Kushwant Singh, Maxine Hong Kingston, Lee Smith, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Thomas Hardy, R.K. Narayan, Marilynne Robinson, Pablo Neruda, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, John Steinbeck, Agha Shahid Ali, Louis L’Amour, Steven Milhauser, Harriette Arnow, Milan Kundera, Brad Watson, Charles Dickens, Robin Lippincott, Joan Didion, Wallace Stegner, Mirabai, W.S. Merwin, Kirby Gann, Jorge Borges, Tennessee Williams, Sheila and Sandra Ortiz Taylor, James Still, Marianne Worthington, Roger Bonair Agard, Marie Irene Fornez, Michel Foucault, Natalia Ginzburg, Rita Quillen, Victoria Redel, Crystal Wilkinson, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Amar Chitra Katha.
My parents and grandparents. Teachers. Artists. Practical idealists. Hard workers. Good cooks. People who are true to themselves and where they come from. Trees. Unconventional families. Mongrels. Wanderers. Loners. Believers. People who sing out and stand up and do the needful.