Kandala (she/her) is a writer, qualitative researcher & teaching artist from New Delhi.

Kandala’s first love is writing—poetry, fiction, and all things narrative. Her work has won fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Sangam House International Writers’ Residency and the Hudson Valley Writers Center, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Pittsburgh, where she was a Dietrich fellow.

Kandala is currently working on her first full-length poetry collection. Poems from this collection-in-progress have appeared/are forthcoming from a number of publications, including Ploughshares, Rattle, Frontier Poetry, Southeast Review, The Alipore Post, Hindustan Times and the Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City.

Kandala enjoys facilitating creative writing spaces and workshops, and being part of other people’s writing journeys. She has taught creative writing and composition in multiple settings in India and the USA, including at the University of Pittsburgh, where she was nominated for the Elizabeth Baranger Teaching Award. Her brain is always dreaming up a new workshop or writing module—currently, she is building an online session on the theme of Writing Food and Community in collaboration with another poet.

Passionate about gender justice and narrative documentation, Kandala has over a decade of work experience on gender and social justice issues in India. She holds a joint Erasmus Mundus Masters degree in Human Rights Practice from the Universities of Gothenburg; Roehampton and Tromsoe. She has worked with a range of organisations—including PRADAN, Educate Girls, Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan, National Foundation for India, and International Center for Research on Women—in the capacities of documenter, researcher and program manager.

Kandala has conducted in-depth qualitative research, documentation and collected oral histories on gender and cultural issues in multiple geographies in India, including Haryana, Rajasthan, Kutch, Himachal Pradesh, Assam, and Kerala. Her time in the field spent listening to people’s stories formed the initial impetus for her to return to her childhood love for writing in her late twenties.