Author Description

The book historicizes the surge of writing in Odia among the people who migrated to the Americas in search of higher education and fulfilling careers over the last fifty years. The thirty-five short stories in Odia, one in Kosali, and the eleven memoirs included here recapitulate the joy, pain, struggle, and nostalgia of writers torn between their sense of belonging to the home they've left behind and the life they've built here. As most of them would say, Odia, the language, has helped them preserve their identity and ward off the fear of the erasure of the self. The narratives also celebrate, as Salman Rushdie, the great postcolonial writer from India, would say, an eclectic vision of life.