Amitava Kumar is a journalist and author of several works of prize-winning literary non-fiction and two novels. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, the New Yorker, and Granta ('Pyre' was selected by Jonathan Franzen for The Best American Essays 2016). He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and Ford Fellowship in Literature, and is a board member at the Asian American Writers Workshop. He is currently Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College.