About Meena Kandasamy
Meena Kandasamy, born in 1984, is an Indian poet, fiction writer, translator, and activist from Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. Meena Kandasamy has published two collections of poetry, Touch (2006) and Ms. Militancy (2010). From 2001 to 2002, she edited The Dalit, a bimonthly English-language alternative magazine of the Dalit Media Network. She represented India at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program and was a fellow of the Charles Wallace India Trust at the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. She writes for platforms such as Outlook India and The Hindu.As a writer, Meena Kandasamy mainly focused on caste annihilation, feminism, and linguistic identity. She says, "Poetry is not caught in larger structures that push you to adopt a certain set of practices while you present your ideas in the manner of academic language," and therefore prefers to use it for her activity as an activist writer. One of her first collections, Touch, was published in August 2006 with a foreword by Kamala Das. Ms. Militancy was published the following year. In this book, she adopts an anti-caste and feminist perspective to recount Hindu and Tamil myths. Other works such as Mascara and My Lover Speaks of Rape have earned her first prize in all poetry competitions in India.
Her poems have been published in anthologies and journals, including The Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry, The Little Magazine, Kavya Bharati, Indian Literature, Poetry International Web, Muse India, Quarterly Literary Review, Outlook, Tehelka, and The New Indian Express. She was also invited to participate in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2009. Two years later, Meena was named a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Kent. Meena was named a featured poet at the City of Asylum Jazz Poetry Concert held in Pittsburgh, the 14th International African Poetry Festival (2010), Durban, and the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival (2011). She co-authored Ayyankali: A Dalit Leader of Organic Protest, a biography of Ayyankali, a Dalit leader in Kerala.
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Let me tell you something that goes against popular wisdom. Love is not blind; it just looks in the wrong places.
