About
image credit: H Romero
Manisha Sharma is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of English at Iowa State University.
Literary Hub, The LA Review of Books, and Black Earth Institute highlight Sharma's creative work.
Her creative, interdisciplinary work focuses on characters and the social environments that shape them. Born and raised in India, both Indian and American perspectives inspire her teaching and writing.
Her doctoral work in English Literature explores the role of language in interpreting the emotional impact of harrowing tragedies such as the partition of India and Pakistan. For that, she examined partition fiction written in Indian English, Hindi, and Urdu in Hindi translation, weighing it against postcolonial and linguistic theories by Gayatri Spivak, Braj Kachru, Edward Said, and Probol Dasgupta.
Sharma earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Virginia Tech, where she focused on fiction as an Alfred Knobler Scholar.
Manisha was longlisted for the International Commonwealth Short Story prize, a winner of UC Davis' (now defunct) Greenbelt Review Fiction Prize, and a runner-up for the Virginia Tech Fiction Prize. Her short story was nominated for the Best New American Voices Series, and has been a semifinalist for the American Short(er) Fiction Prize (2019). She's a two-time finalist for the Cream City Review Summer Fiction Prize (2020, 25). A winner of the Causeway Lit Poetry Contest, Sharma is also a finalist for the Iron Horse Literary Chapbook Contest, shortlisted for the Laureate Prize. Her interdisciplinary work on vanishing girls includes field research and poetry, composed into music, which has been presented as an art-sound installation in the United States, Australia, and India.
New writing is forthcoming in the Bellingham Review.
Her poetry and fiction appear in Arts & Letters, Puerto Del Sol, The Common, The Madison Review, The Fourth River, Literary Mama, and similar literary journals. Interdisciplary scholarship appears in The Lancet, Design Observer, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and has also been presented at the White House.
She's been a resident at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and was also an AWP Poetry Mentee.
Through writing, teaching, and yoga, Manisha finds innovative ways to express complex human experiences. She also integrates mindfulness into her work and offers workshops on "Yoga and Meditation for Writers," most recently at the Association of Writers' and Writing Programs' annual conference.
Manisha Sharma is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of English at Iowa State University.
Literary Hub, The LA Review of Books, and Black Earth Institute highlight Sharma's creative work.
Her creative, interdisciplinary work focuses on characters and the social environments that shape them. Born and raised in India, both Indian and American perspectives inspire her teaching and writing.
Her doctoral work in English Literature explores the role of language in interpreting the emotional impact of harrowing tragedies such as the partition of India and Pakistan. For that, she examined partition fiction written in Indian English, Hindi, and Urdu in Hindi translation, weighing it against postcolonial and linguistic theories by Gayatri Spivak, Braj Kachru, Edward Said, and Probol Dasgupta.
Sharma earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Virginia Tech, where she focused on fiction as an Alfred Knobler Scholar.
Manisha was longlisted for the International Commonwealth Short Story prize, a winner of UC Davis' (now defunct) Greenbelt Review Fiction Prize, and a runner-up for the Virginia Tech Fiction Prize. Her short story was nominated for the Best New American Voices Series, and has been a semifinalist for the American Short(er) Fiction Prize (2019). She's a two-time finalist for the Cream City Review Summer Fiction Prize (2020, 25). A winner of the Causeway Lit Poetry Contest, Sharma is also a finalist for the Iron Horse Literary Chapbook Contest, shortlisted for the Laureate Prize. Her interdisciplinary work on vanishing girls includes field research and poetry, composed into music, which has been presented as an art-sound installation in the United States, Australia, and India.
New writing is forthcoming in the Bellingham Review.
Her poetry and fiction appear in Arts & Letters, Puerto Del Sol, The Common, The Madison Review, The Fourth River, Literary Mama, and similar literary journals. Interdisciplary scholarship appears in The Lancet, Design Observer, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and has also been presented at the White House.
She's been a resident at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and was also an AWP Poetry Mentee.
Through writing, teaching, and yoga, Manisha finds innovative ways to express complex human experiences. She also integrates mindfulness into her work and offers workshops on "Yoga and Meditation for Writers," most recently at the Association of Writers' and Writing Programs' annual conference.
