was born in India in 1962, emigrated to the United States in 1968, and
raised in Maryland. After graduating
from Wellesley College in 1984, she received a Thomas J. Watson
Fellowship for travel and study in India, Thailand, Japan, and China.
She received her M.F.A from the University of Virginia where she was a
Hoyns Fellow.
She is a recipient of a Discovery/The Nation Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Poets & Writers Exchange Program Award, fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers conferences, the Glenna Luschei/Prairie Schooner Award for her essay, The Art of Breathing, which appears in the anthology How We Live our Yoga (Beacon 2001). She has been a Contributing and Advisory Editor for Shenandoah and was the guest poetry editor of two issues. She is currently a Book Review Editor for Callaloo and a Senior Poetry Editor of the new journal, Catamaran, featuring work by artists from South Asia. She has translated poems from Urdu. Her work has been translated into Italian.
She was the Writer-in-Residence at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, USA, in 2002.
In her own words:
"Culture shock is not your reflex upon leaving the dock; it is when you have been a law-abiding citizen for more than ten years: when someone asks your name and the name of your religion and your first thought is I don't know..."
'World Hotel' was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book award in 2003, for books that explore the richness of human diversity.
Reetika Vazirani died with her young son on 18 July, 2003.
