Animals: Prose poems on sentiency decency and indecency

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Dr. Anita Nahal is an educator and writer. She has worked in higher education, both in teaching and administration, at various universities for over thirty years. She’s been a Fulbright scholar and an NEH fellowship awardee among other laurels in her academic career. She has published, presented papers and seminars, and created numerous workshops in her discipline of history. She teaches at a university in Washington D.C.

On the creative side, Anita is a poet, flash fictionist, children’s book writer, a recent novelist, and even more recent short film maker. A two-time Pushcart Prize-nominated Indian American author, she won the Nissim Prize for Excellence in Literature for her poetry-prose novel, drenched thoughts (Authorspress, 2023) in 2024.

Anita was a finalist for the Tagore Literary Prize in 2023 for her fourth ekphrastic prose poetry collection, Kisses at the espresso bar (Kelsay Books, 2022). Her third prose poetry collection, What’s wrong with us Kali women? (Kelsay Books, 2021), was nominated by Cyril Dabydeen, poet laureate emeritus, Ottawa, Canada, as the best poetry book of 2021, for British Ars Notoria. It is mandatory reading in a multicultural society course at Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

Anita has one novel, four poetry collections, one of flash fiction, four books for children, and five edited anthologies published. Anita’s poems have appeared in numerous journals in the US, UK, Asia, and Australia and anthologized in many collections, including The Polaris Trilogy (2024), The Best Asian Poetry (2021–22), Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English (2021), and Twenty Contemporary Indian English Poets (2024), the latter released by India’s Academy of Letters—the Sahitya Akademi.

Her poems are also housed at Stanford University’s Digital Humanities Initiative. One of her poems, “Hold on baby, we’ll soon be home,” was included as part of a video produced by Doordarshan TV, Kolkata, India. Some of Anita’s poems are part of an online collection of poetry and art, Crossarts-In Between The Lines on Canadian and Indian diaspora women writers. And one of her poems has also been delivered on the moon as part of The Polaris Trilogy.

Recently, Anita ventured into short filmmaking on her poems, and her first short, “Clubs my sinful dance muse,” was awarded the Best Super Short Film Award by the Five Continents International Film Festival, Venezuela (2024). It was also screened at the Alibag and Goa Short Film Festivals in India in 2024.

Anita is the secretary of the Montgomery Chapter, Maryland Writers Association, and former editor of the newsletter for Poetry Society of Virginia. She is also an active member of the Northern Virginia Writers Club and the Poetry Society of Virginia.

Anita is the daughter of Sahitya Akademi; award-winning Indian novelist and professor, Late Dr. Chaman Nahal; and educationist Late Dr. Sudarshna Nahal. Her family includes her son, daughter-in-law, a grandson, and a golden doodle gal.