Bio

Rani is a dog and TV-obsessed writer, thinker, book lover and vintage clothes collector. Her favorite city is Baltimore, MD. She was a professor of ethnic American and postcolonial literature at Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins University. She currently teaches classes in memoir at GrubStreet in Boston and creative writing and Asian American literature at both Tufts University and Emerson College. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book ReviewELLE.com, Al Jazeera English, CNN, Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan, The Washington Post, Catapult, LongreadsThe Rumpus amongst other publications.

Additionally, Rani is a recipient of a 2022 artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, was long-listed for Cosmonauts Avenue's 2017 Fiction Prize, awarded a 2017 Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Scholarship at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, MA, and has been nominated for two Pushcarts for her work in Redivider and Longreads. She is a 2017 Pauline Scheer Fellow and graduate of the Memoir Incubator at Grub Street in Boston.

Rani co-edited a book about the K-pop group, BTS, titled Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader, with scholars Patty Ahn, Michelle Cho, Vernadette Gonzalez, Mimi Thi Nguyen, and Yutian Wong forthcoming from Duke University Press. She is currently working on a transnational memoir titled Do You Know How Lucky You Are, a story about fractured identity and her relationship with her mentally ill Bengali immigrant mother.

View Rani's CV

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