(photo by Vidhya Manivannan)
Akil Kumarasamy’s debut novel, Meet Us by the Roaring Sea, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2022, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize and Lambda Literary Award. Her linked short story collection, Half Gods, (FSG, 2018), was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize along with a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, American Short Fiction, BOMB, among others. She has received fellowships from the Asian Cultural Council, MacDowell, University of East Anglia, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, Callie’s Berlin, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is an associate professor in the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program and a 2024-25 fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
Akil Kumarasamy 