Jaipur Literature Festival-North Carolina

Sampada Kodagali Agarwal

Sampada Kodagali Agarwal is a passionate visual artist based out of Morrisville, NC, who has spent more than 18 years exploring traditional folk and tribal arts from India, the country of her birth; while living in the United States, her adopted home country. Sampada is a CZT (Certified Zentangle® Teacher) since 2012 and has worked extensively in different folk art styles from India like Warli, Madhubani, Alpona, Mandana, Gond, Mata ni Pachedi, and Chittara using various mediums. She loves to explore opportunities where art can become the language that helps bridge barriers and can spill over into everyday life. The main goal driving her creative journey is to use art as a medium to highlight similarities, celebrate differences, and make art accessible to all. 

Shilpa Darivemula

Shilpa Darivemula is a General Research Fellow in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of North Carolina and former creative director of the Aseemkala Initiative. Shilpa began training in Kuchipudi at the age of 8 at the Academy of Kuchipudi Dance and performed her solo debut recital—her Rangapravesham—in 2011 at the Kalanidhi Dance school. Shilpa served as AMWA National Artist-in-Residence in 2016, studied traditional dance as women’s medicine as a Thomas Watson Fellow in 2013, and studied art as a vehicle to teach cervical cancer awareness as a ASTMH Kean Fellow in 2018. She is the former director and co-founder of the Aseemkala Initiative.

Sayantani Dasgupta

Sayantani Dasgupta is the author of Brown Women Have Everything: Essays on (Dis)comfort and Delight. Previous books include the short story collection Women Who Misbehave and Fire Girl: Essays on India, America, & the In-Between, a Finalist for the Foreword Indies Awards for Creative Nonfiction. An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington, Sayantani has also taught in India, Italy, Colombia, and Mexico.

Shobhaa De

Shobhaa De, a renowned author and columnist, is a pioneer in contemporary Indian literature, known for her gripping narratives that dissect urban life's complexities. After studying Psychology at St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, she ventured into journalism, founding and editing magazines like Stardust, Society, and Celebrity. She remains an important social commentator, with regular columns in The Times of India, The Asian Age, and The Week. De also scripted iconic shows like Swabhimaan and hosted Power Trip. Her latest memoir, Insatiable, chronicles the year leading to her seventy-fifth birthday, exploring aging, relationships, and connections through food.

Rishi Jaitly

Rishi Jaitly, an entrepreneur and educator, brings extensive global experience in technology, media, and civics. As Professor of Practice and Distinguished Humanities Fellow at Virginia Tech, he founded the Institute for Leadership in Technology, offering the world's first Executive Degree in the Liberal Arts and Humanities. Additionally, Jaitly serves as a Senior Advisor to OpenAI, driving the company's expansion into India and the Global South. Formerly, he co-founded Times Bridge, facilitating the launch of global companies in India, and held leadership roles at Twitter Inc and Google. Recognized as one of Rest of World Magazine’s ‘Top 100 Global Tech Changemakers’, Jaitly holds an A.B. from Princeton University.

Cheetie Kumar

Cheetie Kumar is the chef/owner of Ajja, a restaurant in Raleigh’s Five Points neighborhood that draws inspiration from the diverse foodways and cultures, vibrant spices, and cooking techniques of the  Mediterranean, the Middle East and beyond. Ajja opened in June 2023 and is a James Beard Foundation  Award semifinalist for Best New Restaurant. Ajja was also named an Esquire Best New Restaurant and  Eater’s Best New Carolina's Restaurant.  Kumar has been profiled in The New York Times, Southern Living and The Wall Street Journal, among  many other national publications. She is active in food advocacy and serves on the board of the  Independent Restaurant Coalition, the Southern Foodways Alliance and several North Carolina-based  organizations. She is also a member of World Central Kitchen’s Chef Corps, a global network of  culinary leaders who champion World Central Kitchen’s work providing fresh meals following crises.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies, her debut story collection that explores issues of love and identity among immigrants and cultural transplants. With a compelling, universal fluency, Lahiri portrays the practical and emotional adversities of her diverse characters in elegant and direct prose.Whether describing hardships of a lonely Indian wife adapting to life in the United States or illuminating the secret pain of a young couple as they discuss their betrayals during a series of electrical blackouts, Lahiri’s bittersweet stories avoid sentimentality without abandoning compassion.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake was published in the fall of 2003 to great acclaim. The Namesake expands on the perplexities of the immigrant experience and the search for identity. A film version of The Namesake (directed by Mira Nair) was released in 2007. Lahiri’s book of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, received the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award (the world’s largest prize for a short story collection) and was a finalist for the Story Prize. She contributed the essay on Rhode Island in the 2008 book State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. Her book, The Lowland, won the DSC award for south Asian fiction, and was a finalist for both the Man Booker prize and the National Book Award in fiction.

Lahiri’s first book written in Italian, In Altre Parole, later published in English as In Other Words, explores the often emotionally fraught links between identity and language. Her nonfiction also includes The Clothing of Books which was originally published in Italy as Il vestito dei libri. She has translated three novels by Domenico Starnone; Ties (2017, named a New York Times Notable Book and Best Foreign Novel by the Times of London; Trick (2018, nominated for the National Book Award and winner of the John Florio Prize for translation from Italian to English); and Trust. She edited and partly translated The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories. In 2021 she published her first collection of poems in Italian Il quaderno di Nerina [Nerina’s Notebook] (Guanda, 2021). Her first full-length self-translation is her New York Times bestselling novel, Whereabouts. Originally written in Italian it was published as Dove Mi Trovo in 2018. She has also written a collection of essays on translation, self-translation, and writing across languages titled Translating Myself and Others. Originally published in Italian as Racconti Romani, her new book is Roman Stories (Knopf, October 10, 2023). Translated into English by Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz, the book was a New Yorker 2023 Best Book of the Year. 

Born in London, Lahiri moved to Rhode Island as a young child with her Bengali parents. Although they have lived in the United States for more than thirty years, Lahiri observes that her parents retain “a sense of emotional exile” and Lahiri herself grew up with “conflicting expectations...to be Indian by Indians and American by Americans.” Lahiri’s abilities to convey the oldest cultural conflicts in the most immediate fashion and to achieve the voices of many different characters are among the unique qualities that have captured the attention of a wide audience. She is a graduate of Barnard College and has a Ph.D in Renaissance Studies from Boston University.

In 2014 Jhumpa Lahiri was awarded the prestigious National Humanities Medal. As well as the Pulitzer Prize, Lahiri has been awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award, an O. Henry Prize (for the short story “Interpreter of Maladies”), the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Vallombrosa Von Rezzori Prize, the Asian American Literary Award, and the 2017 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Lahiri was also granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and an National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2006. Previously she was the director of Princeton University’s Program in Creative Writing. She is now the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College. She was also named Commander of the Italian Republic in 2019 by President Sergio Mattarella.

Jhumpa Lahiri divides her time between Princeton and Rome.

William C. McKinney

William C. McKinney of Haynsworth Sinkler Boyd represents clients in governmental, economic development and complex litigation matters. Prior to rejoining the firm, William served as General Counsel to the Governor of North Carolina and Special Counsel to the Attorney General of North Carolina. As General Counsel, he directed the legal strategy of the Governor’s administration in matters such as the state’s COVID-19 State of Emergency and accompanying litigation, multiple hurricanes and high-stakes separation of powers litigation. William also advised on state and federal legislation, executive appointments, public records, executive orders, ethics matters, state finance issues and filling judicial vacancies.
 
In addition to his state and local government experience, William worked in Washington, D.C. as a political officer with the United States Department of State before entering law school. He previously served as an associate attorney with the firm in 2012-2014.

Suketu Mehta

Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. He has won the Whiting Writers’ Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. He is an Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University. His book about global migration, This Land is Our Land, was published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in June 2019. He is also working on a nonfiction book about immigrants in contemporary New York, for which he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Mehta has written original screenplays for films, including New York, I Love You.

Robert Newman

Robert D. Newman has been President and Director of the National Humanities Center since 2015 and is Dean Emeritus at the University of Utah. He has published six books; over a hundred articles, reviews and poems; and has given talks throughout the world

Pat Parker

Patricia (Pat) Parker (Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin) is the Ruel W. Tyson Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she previously served as chair of the Department of Communication and Director of the Graduate Certificate in Participatory Research. A critical communication scholar activist and decolonial researcher, her work centers Black feminist/womanist leadership as critical organizing praxis. Her most recent book, Ella Baker’s Catalytic Leadership (University of California Press) is grounded in the Black intellectual traditions advanced by human rights strategist Ella Baker. It is a primer on community engagement drawn from her participatory research with Black teen girls learning and doing social justice leadership following those traditions.

Pat’s current projects flow from her work as co-chair (with James Leloudis) of the University Commission on History and Race where she is leading efforts to center Black descendant communities in telling the histories of their ancestors and memorializing them, while creating pathways toward reckoning, healing, and repair.

Pat is the 2023 recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Award, one of the highest honors for UNC-Chapel Hill faculty in recognition of academic work that exemplifies the ideals of democracy, public service, and the pursuit of knowledge.

Sree Sreenivasan

Sree Sreenivasan is president of SAJA, South Asian Journalists Association, and is former Chief Digital Officer of New York City, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Columbia University. He serves on the board of Nobel Prize Outreach.

In 2004, Newsweek named him one of the 20 most influential young South Asians in America, alongside a rising politician named Kamala Harris. His digital and training agency, Digimentors, is proud to partner with JLF USA.

Barbara J. Stephenson

Barbara J. Stephenson is vice provost for global affairs and chief global officer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a distinguished diplomat, former U.S. ambassador, international leader and prior dean of the Leadership and Management School at the Foreign Service Institute. She advances a pan-university global strategy to enhance UNC-Chapel Hill’s global reach, impact and reputation.

Stephenson, a fierce advocate for the role of higher education in addressing complex global challenges, has extensive experience forging constructive collaboration across societies and geographies.

Previously, Stephenson was president of the American Foreign Service Association from 2015-2019 and was a U.S. Foreign Service officer for over 30 years. She was a principal advocate for diplomacy, working closely with Congress, the media and globally engaged strategic partners.

At the Foreign Service Institute, Stephenson launched the Culture of Leadership Roundtable to improve leadership across the State Department and in U.S. embassies around the world. In 2008, she was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Panama and later became the first woman to serve as deputy ambassador and acting ambassador at the U.S. Embassy in London.

As deputy senior advisor to the secretary and deputy coordinator for Iraq (2006-2008), she was recognized with the State Department’s Distinguished Honor Award for developing and implementing the civilian surge, the largest deployment of civilians to a war zone since the Vietnam War. She coordinated across federal agencies and the U.S. Congress to unite stakeholders behind a mission to reverse the spiral into sectarian violence by strengthening governance in Iraq.

From 2001-2004, as the American Consul General in Belfast, Northern Ireland, she helped renew support for the Good Friday Agreement that brought an end to decades of violence. As Consul General and Chief of Mission in Curaçao (1998-2001), she won support from local and Dutch officials to establish two U.S. Air Force bases to support Plan Colombia.

Earlier in her career, Stephenson served as special assistant to Under Secretary for Political Affairs Tom Pickering, covering European affairs, including the war-torn Balkans. Other assignments have included desk officer for the UK, political-military officer in South Africa, and political officer in The Hague, San Salvador, and Panama.

Stephenson, who earned her doctorate, master’s and bachelor’s in English literature from the University of Florida, speaks Spanish and Dutch and reads French and Hebrew.

Shashi Tharoor

Shashi Tharoor, a third-term Member of Parliament for Thiruvananthapuram, is the bestselling author of twenty-five books, both fiction and non-fiction, besides being a former Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and a former Minister of State for Human Resource Development and for External Affairs in the Government of India.

He has won numerous awards, including the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Crossword Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2019, Dr. Tharoor was also awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award under ‘English Non-Fiction’ for his book, An Era of Darkness.

He chairs the Parliament’s Standing Committee on Chemicals and Fertilisers and has previously chaired the Standing Committee on External Affairs and the Committee on Information Technology.