Piyali Bhattacharya is a writer, editor, and professor of Creative Writing. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Literary Hub, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic and elsewhere. She is the editor of the anthology Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion (Aunt Lute Books, 2016), which won the Independent Publisher Book Award and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Piyali holds a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College, an M.A. from SOAS—University of London, and an M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin—Madison, where she was winner of the Peter Straub Award for Fiction. Her writing interests range from food and the politics that surround it, to immigration, healthcare, women’s voices, and textiles. She is currently at work on her first novel, which has been supported by fellowships from Hedgebrook, Millay Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Piyali is the Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has received the Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching and Mentoring in Creative Writing. She was born in New York City, and lives in Philadelphia and New Delhi.