About
Kavita Das worked for social change for close to fifteen years, addressing issues ranging from community and housing inequities, to public health disparities, to racial injustice. Although Kavita remains committed to social justice issues, she left the social change sector to become a full-time writer and to tell the life story of Grammy-nominated Hindustani singer Lakshmi Shankar through her first book Poignant Song: The Life and Music of Lakshmi Shankar (Harper Collins India, June 2019).
At the root of both her writing and social change work is Kavita’s desire to provoke thought and engender change by recognizing and revealing the true ways in which culture, race, and gender intersect especially when it comes to societal inequities. Kavita has been a regular contributor to NBC News Asian America, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Rumpus. In addition, her work has been published in Salon, WIRED, Poets & Writers, Catapult, LitHub, Tin House, Longreads, Kenyon Review, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Guernica, McSweeney’s, Fast Company, Quartz, Colorlines, Romper, and elsewhere. She was nominated for a 2016 Pushcart Prize and her full writing portfolio can be found at kavitadas.com.
Kavita created the popular “Writing with Conscience” nonfiction seminar and has taught at the New School and conducted workshops at vital writing spaces including Catapult, Grub Street, Kundiman, StoryStudio, and Tin House, along with being a guest lecturer. Kavita’s “Writing with Conscience” seminar inspired her second book, Craft and Conscience: How to Write About Social Issues (Beacon Press, 2022). Her essays on social issues have been included in two creative writing textbooks.
Kavita is currently a Masters in Fine Arts candidate in creative nonfiction and screenwriting at Antioch University where she is the Eloise Klein Healy Scholar and she received a B.A. in Urban Studies from Bryn Mawr College She lives in her hometown of New York City where she tries to keep up with the city that never sleeps and her six-year-old daughter Daya.
