Dipika Mukherjee

Dipika Mukherjee is the author of the poetry collections Dialect of Distant Harbors (CavanKerry Press, forthcoming October 2022), The Third Glass of Wine (2015),  and The Palimpsest of Exile (2009). Her poetry appears in publications around the world, including RHINO, PostColonial Text, World Literature Today, Asia Literary Review, Del Sol Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review. In 2016, she won the Liakoura Prize for Poetry.

Mukherjee’s debut novel, Ode to Broken Things, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and her second novel, Shambala Junction, won the UK Virginia Prize for Fiction. Her short story collection is Rules of Desire. Her essays appear in Newsweek, Los Angeles Review of Books, Hemispheres, Orion, Scroll, The Edge, and more. Her work is also included in The Best Small Fictions 2019.

Mukherjee earned her PhD in English (sociolinguistics) from Texas A&M University. In her scholarly work, she focuses on the intersections between national language policy and migrant groups in Malaysia. With Maya Khemlani David, she coedited National Language Planning and Language Shifts in Malaysian Minority Communities: Speaking in Many Tongues (2011). Mukherjee has taught language and linguistics in many places, including China, India, the Netherlands, the United States, Malaysia, and Singapore.

Mukherjee is a contributing editor for Jaggery. She teaches at the Graham School at University of Chicago as well as at StoryStudio Chicago. She has mentored Southeast Asian writers for over two decades and edited five anthologies of Southeast Asian fiction. She lives in Chicago and has written for the Poetry Foundation's blog, Harriet.