Un-Official Bio
“What is wrong with you?”
“Let me think about that. I’ll tell you the next time I see you.”
The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
Hi! About me: I’m a first generation Indian American raised in the countryside of northeast, Pennsylvania. As a child, I filled my spare time with eighties music, Bollywood movies, and a lot of reading.
I went to Catholic schools/Jesuit prep schools which probably explains my hatred for plaid skirts. My uniforms were itchy wool plaid skirts. Blech.
I was always the oddball growing up. I read all of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boy mysteries and I had an obsession with old school WB shows. We’re talking Angel, Buffy, Felicity, Popular, Dawson’s Creek, One Tree Hill, etc. They don’t make drama like they used to.
So, I went to this writer’s camp when I was sixteen and I made the dramatic change to writing poetry instead of fiction. I didn’t regret going to camp until I hit college when I realized how much I could have accomplished in fiction if I stuck with it. However, poetry has helped me see the world in different ways and I”m grateful for that.
When I got to college (that’s me and some of the girls), I was set back another year in my writing endeavors because I did the whole Indian thing and was pre-med for a year. That totally didn’t work out. Duh.
I started writing fiction again, but decided to write a YA instead of adult romance as an exercise and I was hooked! I finished my first YA book by the time I entered law school in 2007. It’s still sitting under my bed somewhere. My second YA is sitting next to it. In 2008 I wrote my third YA book and voila! I got an agent! I got side tracked again with law school graduation and bar exams (passed on the first try for both PA and NJ baby! woohoo!). In the process, I wrote and sold two adult romance novels and sold a few articles. After graduating Hofstra Law, I started a day job in NYC and my MFA program at Wilkes University on a part time basis. The RWA National Conference was in town that year so I stopped by to visit friends and ran into Antonella Iannarino from David Black Literary and within 2 weeks, I was signed!
And that’s me! I’m Indian so I do write about multicultural characters sometimes, but mostly, I write what makes me happy. I hope that my writing can make you happy, too.
Thanks for reading more about me!