Gaiutra Bahadur

Gaiutra Bahadur is an American journalist and book critic who writes frequently about the culture and politics of global migration. Her reporting, criticism and essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, The Nation, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ms. Magazine and The (London) Observer, among other publications. A former daily newspaper reporter, she has reported on topics and topographies ranging from politics in Texas to the war in Iraq, post-Sept. 11 hate crimes to Hinjew weddings, Austin's high-tech immigrants to Arizona's nativists. Gaiutra studied literature at Yale and journalism at Columbia and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. She was born in Guyana and emigrated to the United States with her family when she was six. She is the recipient of a 2013 New Jersey Council on the Arts Fellowship and a 2013 grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, a national feminist arts organization in the U.S. Both awards were won on the merits of the manuscript for "Coolie Woman," her first full-length book. She is also the author of "Family Ties" (Scholastic, 2012), a nonfiction book for middle-school students about the homeland journeys of President Obama and Amy Tan.