Ines Rodrigues
Brazilian writer and teacher based in New York, Ines Rodrigues has published articles in newspapers and magazines, worked in public radio, and lived in Italy and London before moving to the US to become a fiction writer.
Her first novel, Days of Bossa Nova, published in 2017 by Black Opal Books, is a family saga that takes place in São Paulo, the largest city in South America, from the 1940’s to 2009. It’s a story of love and ambition, flavored with the unique sounds of Brazilian music, radionovelas, politics, and the smell of fresh coffee.
While she is not writing or traveling, Ines teaches Italian (Bronxville Adult School) and Creative Writing at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, in Westchester County, NY.
Ruchira Gupta
Professor Ruchira Gupta is based in India and New York, where she is a visiting professor at New York University. She travels extensively as an organizer and lecturer to speak on behalf of marginalized and exploited young women.
She has edited two anthologies-River of Flesh & Other Stories: The Prostituted Woman in Indian Short Fiction and As if Women Matter: The Essential Gloria Steinem Reader as well as the first manual in the world for law-enforcement officers and prosecutors to address the demand for human trafficking.
Gupta has won an Emmy for a documentary on sex-trafficking, The Selling of Innocents, the French Legion D’Honneur and the Clinton Global Citizen Award for her work to help survivors of trafficking and change policies on their behalf. She helped create the Trafficking Fund for Survivors at the United Nations.
Iris Dobian
Iris Dorbian is a business journalist/blogger. Among the outlets she’s written for are Wall Street Journal, Buyouts, Venture Capital Journal, Investopedia, DMNews, Playbill, Backstage, Media Industry Newsletter, PRNews and Stage Directions (where she served as editor-in-chief for eight years). Her personal essays and short stories have been published in Blue Lyra Review, B O D Y, Embodied Effigies, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Gothesque Magazine and Jewish Literary Journal. A New Jersey native, Iris has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.
Manreet Someshwar
Manreet Sodhi Someshwar trained as an engineer, graduated from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and worked in marketing, advertising and consulting, before writing snuck up on her. An award-winning writer and copy writer, Manreet and her work have been featured at literary festivals in Singapore, Shanghai and Hong Kong. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, the South China Morning Post and several Indian publications. Born and raised in India, she is currently based in NYC where she is pursuing MFA in Creative Writing at City College. Manreet is the winner of CCNY’s Jerome Lowell DeJur award in creative writing for 2017.
Jimin Han
Jimin Han received her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College and her BA from Cornell University. Her work appears in NPR’s Weekend America, Entropy, the Rumpus, HTMLGiant, The Good Men Project, Kartika Review, The NuyorAsian Anthology, and KoreanAmericanStory.org, among others. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute and lives outside New York City with her husband and children.
The Scarsdale Salon 