Misha Rai is the 2018-2021 Kenyon Review Fellow in Prose. Nominated for the 2018 Shirley Jackson Award for an excerpt from her novel-in-progress, she has been awarded fellowships and scholarships from the Virginia Colony of the Creative Arts, The Dana Award in the novel category, and the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies. Her essay, “To Learn About Smoke One Must First Light a Fire,” has been listed as a Notable Essay in the 2019 Best American Essays anthology. She has also been a 2016-2017 Edward H. and Mary C. Kingsbury Fellow and the recipient of the 2015 George M. Harper Award. Her prose has appeared in a number of journals. She was born in Sonipat, Haryana, and brought up in India.
While at MacDowell she completed a short story, began work on two essays, revised three-fourths of Blood We Did Not Spill, and created the blue print for her second novel and wrote the first draft of the first chapter of this second longform project, and learned that she won the 2018 Dogwood Literary Prize for Nonfiction.
