Candid Reads: A Literary Open Mic

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Candid Society launches its monthly Open Mic series, inviting the closeted literati out there to step up and take the mic. Bring out your literary prose and poetry to share with friendly and supportive enthusiasts of the written word. All languages welcome! This session we open with feature readers Sushma Joshi, Kai Bird and Sanjeev Uprety. Sign up at the event or drop us an email if you’d like to read your own work.

Sushma Joshi is a writer and filmmaker. She recently co-edited New Nepal, New Voices, a collection of short stories by 16 Nepali writers, to be published by Rupa in 2008. Her writings appear in Utne Reader, Ms. Magazine, East of the Web, Cold River Review, Mosaic, Samar Magazine and elsewhere. Joshi has had stories translated into Italian, Spanish and Vietnamese.

Kai Bird is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning author and columnist, best known for his biographies of political figures. He was an associate editor and columnist for The Nation magazine from 1978-82. His biographical works include Making of the American Establishment and Hiroshima's Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History. Bird and co-author Martin J. Sherwin won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in biography and the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He is currently writing a memoir about the Middle East.

Sanjeev Uprety is the coordinator of M. Phil in English program and has been teaching at the Central Department of English, Tribhuvan University for the last eighteen years. He writes regularly on art, literature and culture for newspapers. He also acted as the poet protagonist of Nyayapremi, a Nepali version of Albert Camus’ play Les Justes. He is the author of a recently published bestselling Nepali Novel Ghanchakkar. The play version of the novel was performed both at National School of Drama (Rashtriya Natya Vidhyalaya), New Delhi and at Gurukul Kathmandu. He is currently working on the English version of his novel Ghanchakkar.

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